Belphegor - Totenritual
Rating: 7.6/10
With each record since 2006’s Pestapokalypse VI, Belphegor seem to have overstayed their welcome by another increment. They’re the sort of blackened death metal band that pours the Satan on too thick to be anything but parody and yet they continue to perform, year after year, with po-faced sincerity. This is a band with record titles like Lucifer Incestus, Bondage Goat Zombie, and Blood Magick Necromance in their catalog, each with appropriately ridiculous cover art to match; a band that includes Satan’s name in six different languages on their best-known work, Pestapokalypse. They write exclusively in tritones, that family of notes that was once regarded as “the devil’s interval” for its lascivious sonic quality, and make regular use of corpse paint, spikes, fake blood, and skulls as if 1988 never ended and this stuff is still controversial.
I wouldn’t devote so many words to Belphegor if there wasn’t some merit to them, and as grudgingly as I may be in admitting it, they write quality metal--or they have the capacity to do so. Pestapokalypse is both their best record and their last worthwhile one for a while, but flashes of its inspiration appear throughout their career, on up to Totenritual, whose title, if you hadn’t guessed or don’t know a little German, means something like “killing ritual.” With its overstuffed cover art and the prominent positioning of the band’s logo (which of course sports two inverted crosses), the pieces are in place for yet another slog through half-inspired black metal and rote death metal, but opener “Baphomet” throws an early loop: it’s actually a pretty good song, peeling back a substantial portion of the band’s Marduk-y black metal to let the song move propulsively from riff to putrid riff, building up a good head of steam into “The Devil’s Son.” Apart from a corny sample that shouts out the “devil in your flesh,” it’s yet another exercise in speedy and well-crafted death, with an early Darkthrone riff or two snuck in to prepare us for the coming album highlight of “Apophis - Black Dragon.”
The second piece of a saga that includes “Swinefever - Regent of Pigs” and “Totenkult - Exegesis of Deterioration,” it’s undoubtedly the Dark Knight of this hyphenated trilogy: with its black metal flag raised high, the song pulsates with sinister tremolo, blastbeats, and tritone noodling galore (not to mention a single bar of acoustic picking, like a spot of blood on black robes). “Apophis” wields an icy mystique heightened by Belphegor’s signature juxtaposition of cultish chants and Helmuth Lehner’s inhuman gargles, the sort of sonic blueprint that would almost legitimizes the band’s obsessive shock-Satanism if not for their overwrought image,and a tendency to rely on verse-chorus-verse structuring. Though they seem to be trying to turn things around--“Spell of Reflection,” an album highlight, is a progression of distinct segments lashed together with a sick tremolo melody, after the initial thrill of a recharged Belphegor wears off, we can see that, under all its devilish bluster, the album is riddled with overlong choruses and repetitive passages that don’t serve the hypnotic purpose they would in more straightforward black metal. They’re simply sections the band chooses to repeat on their way to the next, padding out ideas that only require about half the runtime to make an impression and rendering multiple back-to-back listens a bit of a chore. “Baphomet” suffers, “The Devil’s Son” a little more so; only “Apophis” gets away with it, precisely because it’s the most blackened song on the album, while the other two acts of the trilogy succeed to much lesser extents.
The album’s greatest strength, and its saving grace, is its sequencing, as well as its brevity, despite many tracks crossing the five-minute mark. They’ve perfected their ability to segue from wicked tritone melodies to feverish blasting and back, and Lehner remains one of the most underappreciated growers/gurglers in the death metal industry. Totenritual is only as strong as Belphegor’s songwriting, and the fact that they continue to adhere to bog-standard song structures can only continue to harm them in the long run, but the album remains impressively steadfast in its approach; by the time “Embracing A Star” enters like a blast of rotten air from a defiled crypt (that’s praise, believe me), its mystical harmonies feel organic to what we’ve been hearing since “Apophis - Black Dragon,” and the closing title track the wrapping up of a complete musical idea. All in all, it’s remarkable that such a conceptually ridiculous band could pull off such a worthwhile record eleven albums deep, and that’s more than I thought I would ever say to Belphegor’s credit.
-Brian L.
Archival details
- Original URL
- https://metallifestyle.weebly.com/metal-lifestyle/review-belphegor-totenritual
- Recovery source
- live-weebly
- Recovery date
- 2026-07-22
- Stewardship polish
- 2026-07-22
- Preservation status
- restored
- Missing assets
- None recorded
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