Review by Ben for Impaled Nazarene - Tol Cormpt Norz Norz Norz... (1993)

I recall thinking Impaled Nazarene were cool back in 1993 when I was 16 years old. They brought a certain tasteless, hardcore nastiness to black metal that appealed to my teenage mindset. But over the years I've come to see the band as more and more of a joke and found less and less things to enjoy on these early albums. When I listen to Tol Cormpt Norz Norz Norz these days, all I can hear is repetitive structures, high levels of immaturity and cheesy imagery, with the occasional entertaining track. I don't mean to sound arrogant, but I think as my musical development expanded over the years, the more this style of music lost its appeal.

Impaled Nazarene do indeed play black metal, but it's massively infused with punk attitude. It's relentless in its approach and all starts to sound the same very quickly. One of the bands strengths is also its weakness, being Mika's vocals. His style is immediately recognisable and at first his raspy, venomous shouting seems to work well over the repetitive riffs and constant barrage of drumming. But he just does the same thing over and over on every track until it becomes extremely tiresome. When combined with all the cheesy backing sound effects (including admittedly humorous goat noises), crappy "Satanic" roars and pointless 20 second tracks, I find it very hard to take any of this even remotely seriously. A lot of reviewers below use words like evil, hatred, Satanic etc., but there is nothing very dark or evil about Impaled Nazarene because it's entirely a piss-take. Just as Venom did in the early 80's, these Finnish youths are clearly just having a laugh and that's apparent in the result.