Tracklist
album info:
Verified yes
Discs1
GenreMetal
Rank−
Released1990-00-00
Record labelOsmose Productions
Charts
AddedJuly 4th, 2005
Last updatedMarch 17th, 2018
AboutWorship Him
by Samael
Type: Full Length
Release date: April 1st, 1991
Catalog ID:OP 001
Label:Osmose Productions
Format: CD
Reviews: 8 reviews
Samael are a band that has garnished a reasonable amount of attention in the "second wave" of black metal. I am not familiar with their later work, but I am told they drastically altered their style. Whatever came of the band later, they were an early part of the black metal explosion. Samael did; however, offer a somewhat different approach to the genre-a factor both good and bad. Worship Him is a flawed classic, with both merit and auditory frustration.
The first thing that immediately becomes obvious is the abysmal production. True to the forefathers of the genre, the album sounds like it was recorded on a 4-track, inside a harmonically hostile basement. If anything, this aspect might add a bit of flavor to raw fans: however, like a Megiddo, it's hard to excuse such poor audio quality in modern times (even for 1991). Nevertheless, factoring in the likely intentional "lo-fi" sound, the band succeeded in capturing the hellish atmosphere associated with black metal.
Musically speaking, Samael seem to derive much of their influence from Bathory (no big surprise). The tortured, shrieking vocals properly emulate the horrid screams of "Under the Sign of the Black Mark." Likewise, the rawness is a match for the 1987 classic. The primitive riff structure is more reminiscent of Hellhammer: simplistic: bludgeoning: somewhat catchy. Not surprisingly, the bass is hard to decipher from the sharp guitar. In complete contrast to many of their fellow black metal bands, Samael do not play at supersonic speed. Drum patters are much greater in variation then say, Immortal, with slow tempo doom metal mixed with atypical thrash beats. Though many would be pleased by the lack of persistent blast beats, Samael take their separation from standard black metal tempo to the extreme.
Samael; simply put, should have played a little faster on the album. Taking into account that blast beats can become annoying, the band would have benefited from remaining in a standard, thrash tempo for a majority of the album. For example: "Sleep of Death" begins the album quite appropriately, with venomous speed behind the talon-like guitars. After setting the pace for an adrenaline fused blood bath, the band slows the tempo to an almost plodding pace for the next few songs. Samael kicks up the thrash assault once more, only to stifle the onslaught with sloth. Frustration partially nails the coffin on this potentially groundbreaking addition to the dark library of metal.
Some of the album's impact is salvaged by Samael's skill at haunting melody and intros. Worship Him is a valuable album in exploring the early, second black metal wave; however, it is hardly a masterpiece. One could spend their money on much worse, but a score of better albums also exist.
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There's a very small, perhaps very, very slowly growing movement within the extreme community which seems to promote the idea that for an expression within extreme metal to be valid, it must be some sort of "true art" or whatever, on par with the great composers or painters or writers of the 18th or 19th century. There is considerable effort put into creating a narrative in which bands like Incantation are supposedly on the same level as Beethoven or Mozart in compositional skill, creativity, vision and impact, and for some reason these people are able to take themselves seriously and do not seem to feel ridiculous about their claims at all. It seems to function on a footing similar to those of people who in all seriousness discuss what type of reptile hybrid Barack Obama's secret service agent transformed into in that video that was briefly popular on the internet some time ago. People can believe just about anything, in any artificially created reality they just need to tell themselves as truth often enough.
What leads me to the previous particular opening paragraph for this particular album I'm reviewing is a desire to return to the roots of what drew people into extreme metal in the first place, and being honest to oneself and others about what the extreme forms of metal's core appeals are. Shall we exhibit this required level of honesty and simply admit to ourselves that, whatever artistic depth we have discovered in the style subsequently aside, what pulled us in originally, what we were looking for originally, was how vile, how disgusting, how nihilistic, how morbid, and how evil everything in extreme metal was? This overwhelming quality of overstepping all boundaries to create a force so dark and destructive, so unlike everything created before. An unholy union of qualities you wouldn't have found in any other extreme genre at the time. Sure, extreme grindcore like Anal Cunt or extreme noise like Masonna will have sounded vile and disgusting back around the time most of us discovered extreme metal, but metal didn't stop at vile and disgusting and added a lot more extreme qualities, like extremely dark atmosphere, extremely dense structure and extremely morbid riffing.
There are a number of albums from around the late 80s to early 90s that symbolised this amalgamation of extreme qualities quite perfectly, some have been or will be covered in other parts of this series. One that stands out in particular, though, when thinking of vile, disgusting, nihilistic, morbid, evil, and so forth, is Samael's debut album Worship Him. It has a sound of such pure, unadulterated darkness and such primitive brutality that only the beginnings of extreme metal (if you still count the late 80s as such) are capable of. Suffocating riffing meets an atmosphere from the depths of hell, played with such irreverence for pleasantness and mass compatibility that it was truly shocking for the context of the time of its release.
The riff writing at the core of this album sounds sort of like a cross between what would happen if you sucked any and all trace of NWOBHM out of early Venom and left only the morbidly antagonistic audial devil worship, and the life-drenching doom and gloom of Samael's unforgettable compatriots Hellhammer (and traces of early Celtic Frost.) Both Venom and Hellhammer are similarly defined by a "bulldozing" quality of their assaults on the senses, though accomplishing that sound by greatly different approaches. One relying more of the power of its riffs, the other more on sound and rhythm. Samael have decided to continue that quality and combine both approaches, while at the same time removing anything remotely positivistic or upbeat. Worship Him is not an album to have fun to. Any and all "party music" qualities of its progenitors have been mercilessly extinguished. What's left is a core of riffs that definitely harkens back to the earliest days of extreme metal, but is unforgivingly dark and evil. Exactly the type of stuff anyone who can relate to this review's first two paragraphs was looking for when first getting into extreme metal.
It isn't just the core of riffs that is so brutal and morbid in its primitivity. Both the whole songwriting process and the production process seem to follow the singular goal of sucking anything life-affirming and beautiful out of what had been in extreme metal before. Riffs are arranged in a very simple fashion, but one efficient at its destructiveness. The percussion at the same time reminds of ancient war drums and whips the listener into a frenzy of worship of the dark and evil. It helps create a certain passion that the music otherwise might have lacked, even if the lack of passion would be minimal considering the unhinged brutality of the riffs. The vocals themselves add a charme of irreverence few extreme metal vocalists could provide. The combination of all instruments drips of blasphemy, and it is irresistable to succumb to it. The rough but sharp nature of the production puts it on perfect footing to do its deed. Cutting the air like a razorblade, but foul enough to simultanously drench the atmosphere in utter darkness, it puts the extreme nature of the performance in the perfect frame to achieve its maximum efficiency. Simply perfect for this album.
As we all know, the band only maintained its level of brilliance briefly, releasing one more album that while being slightly weaker by nature of experimenting with higher levels of accessibility, still maintained many of the enduring qualities of this debut, before quickly deteriorating into some sort of circus act through the inclusion of one ill-advised idea after another, eventually packing entire albums to the brim with them. It is always a shame to see such a magnificent band lose its relevance in such a short time, but what remains is a debut album that personifies extreme metal like few others, and is an absolute masterpiece in the field.
--- Originally written for http://droneriot.blogspot.com
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Worship Him is aesthetically the full-length expansion to the style of the Medieval Prophecy EP, but the intervening years had been put to good use in prepping that and newer material for a higher production value that would, in my estimation, render it far more effective and resonant. We're still hearing what ranks among the crudest of Samael's content, but it's refined to the point that it doesn't sound like a suffocated soundboard demo from a rather mediocre rehearsal room session. This is also the most distinctly 'black metal' of their records, obvious with the daemonic cover art and occult/horror lyrical content, but I should qualify that a little further, for these Swiss did not exactly walk the same left hand path as so many of their European counterparts...
Whereas might find, in the evolution of Greek black metal, a huge influence of melodic heavy metal riffs on the older recordings of Rotting Christ, meshed in with the darker lyrical themes and harsh vocals, so too do they appear here, only they feel more strictly chord-based, like the dirtier early 80s stuff by Manowar, Witchfinder General or other legends who weren't always known for having the best of production. Burly, driving chord progressions that teeter on the predictable, but where these guys deviate is in their huge Hellhammer influence. We might argue that if anyone had a right to ape Tom G. Warrior's seminal extremity, it was his own countrymen, though by this time Darkthrone had already been shifting in this direction. That said, where Fenriz and N. Culto took those primal grooves, distorted and froze them beneath a winter moon, Vorphalack plays a lot more cleanly, with some fairly obvious riff choices even for their day (even for the late 80s). So, to an extent, I have to say I always found the guitars on this record to be among the least compelling of Samael's career, but Worship Him compensates with its slight sense of novelty...for 1991, this was pretty fucking fresh and diabolic sounding even if you couldn't get past the 50/50 hit/miss ratio of the guitars.
But definitely some heavy metal here, some of that Hellhammer/Celtic Frost primordial doom and drudge-thrash with some occasional forays into a mid-to-fast pace more reflective of what most other trailblazing black metal acts were producing (i.e. "The Black Face"). The drums were rarely 'extreme', more of a steady barrage of simple beats or double-kick batteries that supported the obsidian bluntness of the chords, with a handful of warlike cadences that I found eerily reminiscent of material from Bathory's classics Under the Sign of the Black Mark and Blood Fire Death (like those breaks in "Knowledge of the Iron Kingdom" which remind me of the title track to the latter). Masmiseîm's bass lines here are largely unimpressive, following along dully to the rhythm guitar cards with an occasional, but at least the tone helps to fatten up the slower, doomed riffing sequences. The rhythm guitar tone is not too saturated, almost at times like early Candlemass with a little more flange or reverb, some snail paced chugging, but despite the baseness of the composition they still manage to sound quite evil more often than not, because it just has no sense of foundation of melody, warmth or friendliness anywhere. Just a steady, damned march into the abyssal pits...the most peppy this gets is the vile thrashiness of a tune like "Morbid Metal".
Vorphalack really ties this all together with his snarl, and the guy has always surprised me, because in reality he has one of the least pronounced, occasionally garbled sounding harsh vocals in all that old wave of black metal. He doesn't have a ton of sustain to his rasp, nor is he the most wretched or sinister, but there's this sort of messy, 'no-fucks-given' inflection in his reverbed barks which almost makes Samael feel like some sort of snotty, highbrow black metal ritual, and I do not at all mean that as anything other than a compliment. The album speaks to me as if it's 'better than me' without the band ever even giving a fuck or trying too hard, especially as half the lyrics are depressingly simple (like the title track itself with its repetitious lines of "He is.../he is..."). Not sure if that will make much sense to anyone, but it ultimately contributes a charming, sadistic personality to what is often a fairly barebones and commonplace set of riffs exploring the more layman hybridization of black and doom, a natural extension of Hellhammer's morbidity after Celtic Frost had already more or less folded post glam-phase.
Now, this wasn't my first Samael full-length, instead one step in reverse, and it did take me some time to develop any appreciation, because in the early 90s I was still so heavily focused on the brilliance and intricacy of well-written thrash, death and power metal riffing that a lot of these slower, atmospheric-dependent records were not showpieces in my personal wheelhouse. Amazingly, this one seems to only grow more effective with age, not that it's amongst my favorite or even my half dozen favorites in this band's canon, but there's just something supremely pure and puerile about it that I can still lose myself in after so many years. The weird little touches like the ambient interlude "Last Benediction" or the pure doom instrumental "Rite of Cthulhu" only add to the gloomy, black magic aesthetic pulsing through the songwriting of the longer metal tracks. In the end, this is just one of those flawed, beloved black & white cult classics of its style...not nearly the masterpiece some stingy genre purists would paint, but an unassailable transition between the 'first wave' of European black metal (which wasn't really black metal as we know it) and the acts that would evolve that diversified darkness into its own established medium.
-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com
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Switzerland really is an unusual country. Neutral in politics and central in location, it seems to be happy enough to absorb all the influences around it and exude them in its own personal fashion. Thus is the case with its metal scene as well, which has some of the most original and unique bands in metal history. Samael is one of those bands, an ever shifting entity that has brought us so many different albums and has never been afraid of experimentation. But like any band they had to start somewhere and that place for Samael is none other than the cult classic Worship Him.
Borrowing heavily from the riffs of country mates Celtic Frost, the trio composed by brothers Xy and Vorph (here with larger spelling) and longtime bassist Mas (also under a different alias) have crafted a nice piece of pre-second wave black metal that stands on its own two feet. Yes, not all black metal comes from Norway, and as the creepy intro of "Sleep Of Death" starts one can immediately understand why this record turned into a classic. The eerie vibe emanating from the keyboards gives way for mid-paced riffs and the venomous spewing of blasphemous words that reek of a foul atmosphere. It's a small step before we're treated with the title track and the following minutes are absolutely destructive, with this simple riff being played at a really slow pace without anything but Vorph's screams of anguish in between. The main riff is one of the highlights and trademarks of this album and is sure to leave no one indifferent as its simplicity carries you along through a foggy mist into a dark castle on the top of a hill. The moment near the five minute mark where the song just suddenly gets some momentum is wonderfully crafted and shows that not all great things come from Norway, at least when it concerns black metal.
The dark mass is carried along at a sluggish pace until we reach the fastest point of this record with "Morbid Metal", a deliciously crafted piece of Darkthrone one year before them doing what they do best. It's the fastest track here and one of the few to grace us with some fast blast beats and a more Scandinavian feel. We get treated with more of this formula after a small interlude with another fast track, and then we reach the album's apex with one of Samael's hymns, "Into The Pentagram". A whole paragraph could be dedicated to this song, from the resounding drums on top a mid-paced riff accompanied by Vorph's most vitriolic vocals to the great bass lines during the pre chorus and more atmospheric parts of the song. The use of reverb on the guitar is a constant during the entire album but here is where it really shows how it can be put to great avail. This is a staple song on the band's live catalog, even after twenty years since it was put out, so if there's any highlights here this would certainly be one.
The production on this album is brilliant as each instrument shines to its utmost capacity, all clearly heard despite the bass being slightly low in the mix and that's about my only complaint to it. A few notches up and it would be perfect. The use of reverb that I mentioned before complements the clean production with an oozing and dripping feeling that is further intensified by the speed (or lack of) at which the album is played. The few and far between use of keyboards is another aspect that further enhances this experience and that's proven true with the haunting "Last Benediction", another atmospheric moment that preludes the closing song on the album, aptly entitled "The Dark", finishing this album the same way as it had started forty minutes ago with some great riffing in the vein of old Celtic Frost.
It's funny how mostly everyone considers A Blaze In The Northern Sky to be the defining moment, or better said the turning point in the passage from first to second wave of black metal. It's also funny that many would overlook Worship Him which predates said album solely based on the future efforts of the band, especially when they showcase a totally distinct approach to extreme metal. I think that this album ultimately suffers from being too in-between both waves, as it borrows the musical aspects mainly from the first but ends up being released right before the precursor of the second, despite already displaying aspects of what it would become a year later. The fact that it came out immediately before the Norwegian boom has sadly turned this into an overlooked album.
This is hardly an album that should be avoided and in fact is something worth visiting many times, given that you have a taste for mid-paced atmospheric black metal. I can see this album being a great influence for the Hellenic scene, with bands like Varathron and Rotting Christ following in its footsteps. So if you enjoy that type of black metal you should definitely check out this album. Samael would do better later on in their careers but they would hardly do anything as dark as this ever again.
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When I found this CD, in the original version, in a second hand shop I was full of joy. I've been longing for this rarity for years. It's the very first Osmose Production release and itself a rarity for musical importance in black metal. Samael are from Switzerland and they were inevitably influences by Hellhammer in that period and from the other old school, primitive realities like Venom and early Sodom.
I've always supported the idea that the black metal, the basics, don't come from the Scandinavian Peninsula, but mostly from the central part of Europe that includes also Italian bands like Necrodeath and Mortuary Drape, beside the ones I said before. Right from these bands you can understand the natural evolution of this genre in the north countries. Here, with this Worship Him album, Samael became one of the most occult and obscure bands between the first and the second wave of black metal, being from 1990.
The rhythms are never excessively fast. "Sleep of Death" is faster for the bass drum work but the guitars conserve always that muddy, dirty and occult tune that is heavily inspired by Helhammer. Also a completely doom songs like the title track or "Into the Pentagram" are completely worshiping in that sense. Sorry about the words play. The vocals are minimalist and already black metal oriented with a sick but not too extreme shriek variant. There are very similar to the ones that Abbath would have done on the Immortal debut two years later.
Anyway, what I always found really black metal in this CD is the whole atmosphere that surrounds the songs. It's completely pitch black, with no sign of light and the echoing production gives you the idea of being in a desolated cavern with these musicians, preparing for black mass. I believe that this production was very important for this new genre, and also for the future generation of depressive black metal bands. The guitars are really essential and often they play just open chords notes to be more doom and heavy, with long sounds.
The lyrics as you can see are about esoteric themes, occultism and so on. So, it's another very important thing for this genre. Basically, there aren't tracks made to be catchy but only to be excessive, shocking and completely obscure. The speed parts of "Morbid Metal" are new and unusual for the album, and exactly for this reasons, the up tempo parts are even more appreciated. Here they reminded me a lot the sounds on the Onslaught debut LP, Power From Hell.
Overall, this is a good piece of primordial black metal. It's not awesome, being still a bit immature for some parts and repetitive, but apart from these flaws, worth a listen. It's an important testimony of how black metal was evolving between the 80s and the 90s. Recommended for a history lesson in this genre and, to who already has it, it's an occasion to brush up your mind.
77/100 for the music.
90/100 for the importance.
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This is the first full-length of the great band Samael, and personally I consider it a brilliant BM work. We're not talking about the classic "True-fucking-Norwegian-black-metal", nevertheless this sounds great, excellent, from –almost- every point of view. Vorph is an evil genius, just like his brother who is the mind of the band – a band which will have a great success. Although Samael don't come from Norway, or however from the north where lots of memorable BM bands emerged in early '90, they deserve all the respect, from the beginning of their career until Solar Soul, truly the highlight of the new electronic era. It's impressive. I tried to listen first to Solar Soul and then to Worship Him; from pure light and optimism to a deep and dark black Metal opus.
A black Metal without fast and possessed drumming and with slow tempos, almost like doom Metal, vampiric vocals, some keyboards here and there, disquieting guitars and that's it. But it is extremely appreciable. The music in this album is winding, there are a lot of spells and satanic invocations –OBVIOUSLY- but instead of screaming out "SATAN SATAN OH SATAN" like the other 10000 black Metal bands in the world, Samael prefer to write cultured and well-read lyrics, and that is a typical feature of the Swiss band I dearly love.
"Sleep of Death" opens this masterpiece –yeah, I said masterpiece- and shows how Samael can be creepy and devilish: actually, the first thing you can notice are the vocals; a lot of people don't appreciate Vorph in this release, maybe because he's too weak and dull, but I really don't bother. He sings wonderfully. And so on, with the title track which is the second highlight and one of the slowest tracks in the album. The evil invocations (Belf, son of Belf, give me the power to kill at distance,) in the mid-paced "Knowledge of the Ancient Kingdom" are astonishing, the convulsive riffs in "Morbid Metal" seem to come from the depths of hell, the instrumental "Rite of Cthulhu", "Last Benediction" and "The Dark" are perfect, the slow and frightful "Into the Pentagram" shines for its perfidy -always with Vorph's screams that maintain the pathos- and the brief but very intense "Messengers of the Light" isn't less interesting; "The Black Face" is the fastest track and the umpteenth highlight. Well, I have to say that the whole album is a unique highlight with few flaws, like its repetitiveness, and they don't deserve to be considered so much.
There's the remastered version too, with a Venom cover and eight live-performed songs; I assure you that Samael are not SO bad here, but I know they could be better.
If you are a blackster and you are looking for something different from the canonical black, get this. And if you love it -I hope-, then get the other two Samael's black Metal albums, they won't disappoint you.
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I want to like this album more; I really do. Old-school Black Metal is one of my favorite things that Metal has to offer, and this album is supposed to be really important for the old Black Metal scene. Stylistically, this has a lot in common with various '80s recordings like Hellhammer's Apocalyptic Raids, Bathory's Under The Sign Of The Black Mark, and especially Sepultura's Morbid Visions. The vocal-work is great. Vorphalack has a really haunting, demonic high-pitched scream, which doesn't sound energetic or intense, but rather calculated and sinister. The guitar tone is near-perfect, with a very raw, sharp dungeon-like feel added to the riffs. The drumming is also inventive, and never does the same thing for too long. I can even listen to a song or two from here every now and then and enjoy them.
So why doesn't this get a higher rating? The vast majority of the album is extremely slow. I can't stand it most of the time when an album is filled with slower-paced songs. I don't really mind at the start of the album, as Sleep Of Death is a faster track. Then the title track comes up, and it's slow for the most part, but in a way that works; plus there are a couple faster moments spread through the song to help break up the monotony. Then Knowledge Of The Ancient Kingdom comes up, and it's another slow song. It's not horrible, but there was just a slow song before it, which sounds very similar to this one. The album doesn't really speed up until Morbid Metal starts up, and that is fast at first, but even it becomes much slower later on. The only other songs that are fast after that are The Black Face and The Dark, and the latter is an instrumental. I'm not saying that slow automatically equals bad, but in order for me to enjoy a slower song, there has to be something about it that really grabs my attention, and keeps me interested. Having a bunch of slow songs take up the majority of an album, especially when they all sound similar to a degree, is not enjoyable. I think that if Samael had sped up some of the slower songs on here, then this album would be a lot better.
I imagine that if you're into a lot of slower-paced Metal that you would like this a lot. But if you come in expecting something that's fast for the majority of the album length, then you're going to be disappointed. I just hope that someday Worship Him as a whole will click with me, and I start to consistently enjoy the album. Until then, this is going to be an album that I only listen to rarely.
Highlights: Sleep Of Death, the title track, The Black Face
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This is Samael at their earliest and most hideous spawning, which would heavily differ from the now multi-musically inspired Samael. When first rose out of the predominately French speaking side of Switzerland in the later part of the '80s they pushed out a few stillbirths, but then swayed a few misfits in the next decade with the fully developed studio recorded album: 'Worship Him.' I feel it is an album that is their darkest and most sinister in comparison to their future outputs. This was recorded almost a year prior in '90, but even when it was released in '91 by Osmose, according to the owner in a later interview I read it was even hard to sell then; possibly with a combination of a newly acquired label and newly arisen extreme metal band not setting in just yet. Which shows that what they were doing at the time was at least something different than the rest.
The album's production is dripping with evil distastefulness. It is all around audible, yet it is neither patchy nor supremely flawless, but well deserved as a dark force which is now just a long lost forethought in Samael's minds. If you travel back to the year 1984 and searched for young and extreme metal groups with an upcoming experimental approach, then Hellhammer's 'Apocalyptic Raids' should ring bells, and carry on trails of influences in its former foreboding path. This is essentially to be found on a later journey made into Samael's hellacious debut.
The first piece of damnation and the leading drive behind their songs is the guitars. The guitars, obese with heaviness, slowly goes on the Slim Fast diet as each album after this proceeds. The riffs interchange between fast pumping chugged moments, to slow palm mutes and sometimes single note doominess. The production on his guitars is mildly reverbed, but is also heavily distorted and full and thick sounding. Various pedal effects are used here and there, especially on the song 'Into the Pentagram,' there is a short section where he uses a pedal to compress the sound and alter reality on this cosmic force of interchangeable feats. Masmiseim is listed in the line-up on the album under bass player, but a few lines below it says it is instead performed by Vorphalak. It is played in clean form and basically used to highlight certain riffs by enforcing the riff pounding electric guitars.
If reverb were water, then the drums on 'W.H.' would act as a deadly presser washer and ten fold the excitement at every wet t-shirt contest it was played at. The reverb on his snare possesses a very enchanted, hall-like feel. Which sounds like the walls were slapped in a very long cathedral corridor, and then demonic monks used bells as the hi-hat equivalent. In techniques and styles, the drums range from having slow parts where the guitars along side are palm muted and ended with a few power chords. Furthermore, the drums will utilize the double bass to heighten the part when he hits a few chords, or even during their faster or mid-paced sections. He touches up on the toms and snare rolls, and creates continuous 1st degree battery on the double bass pedals once more.
The vocals are a redeeming, sinister force, also done by electric chainsawist Vorphalack. The vocals are the epitome of this evil drenched entity. They range from howls to destructive growls, which can often extend between the ambiguous palm muted riffs, and customarily end before he hits a chord. He uses a rather extended vocal projection, which fills the riffs with a limited amount of words. Rather than some previous extreme thrash bands would use a quick vocalization and fill a small space with a vast amount of words.
Samael delivered to us a couple of demos that needed sharpening and a spit-shine to polish, musically and production wise between 1987-89. An early band influenced by Hellhammer, and even going on to create simplistic riffs similar to this once monumental death-black metal band. At points, Samael shares a slightly slower playing side comparative to some material by their Swiss counterpart. However, every band has their influences, and Samael of course had their own distinct sound and diversities. They arrived at a point when bands were beginning to create a resurgence of black metal. Also at a point when more and more bands were popping up with faster drums and extended growled or raspy vocals; rather than quick and aggressive thrash type of vocalization of squeezing long phrases into a short riff structure. There was also the addition of more and more bands adding doom-like slower sections into their musical approach; probably more so with later described death metal groups. Some bands were changing and going for an abstract style of dark music, rather than an all-out physically aggressive side. Samael possessed many of these attributes, however they would indeed stand apart from others. The band on from their second debut had steadied themselves to add more consistent mid-paced sections. They also slowly dropped the reverb saturated production and in place gave themselves a more clear, present sound. In my opinion, the music does deliver on their second and third album, but when comparing the overall atmosphere of 'Worship Him,' there is a definite darker leaning more towards this. The later Samael sound swayed onto a more experimental and distant, if even classified as black metal, sound, which I'm not too fond of. Their later material also makes me fall backwards to their earlier releases and want to listen to this as a proven force of time still agreeable now.
by Samael
Type: Full Length
Release date: April 1st, 1991
Catalog ID:OP 001
Label:Osmose Productions
Format: CD
Reviews: 8 reviews
Samael are a band that has garnished a reasonable amount of attention in the "second wave" of black metal. I am not familiar with their later work, but I am told they drastically altered their style. Whatever came of the band later, they were an early part of the black metal explosion. Samael did; however, offer a somewhat different approach to the genre-a factor both good and bad. Worship Him is a flawed classic, with both merit and auditory frustration.
The first thing that immediately becomes obvious is the abysmal production. True to the forefathers of the genre, the album sounds like it was recorded on a 4-track, inside a harmonically hostile basement. If anything, this aspect might add a bit of flavor to raw fans: however, like a Megiddo, it's hard to excuse such poor audio quality in modern times (even for 1991). Nevertheless, factoring in the likely intentional "lo-fi" sound, the band succeeded in capturing the hellish atmosphere associated with black metal.
Musically speaking, Samael seem to derive much of their influence from Bathory (no big surprise). The tortured, shrieking vocals properly emulate the horrid screams of "Under the Sign of the Black Mark." Likewise, the rawness is a match for the 1987 classic. The primitive riff structure is more reminiscent of Hellhammer: simplistic: bludgeoning: somewhat catchy. Not surprisingly, the bass is hard to decipher from the sharp guitar. In complete contrast to many of their fellow black metal bands, Samael do not play at supersonic speed. Drum patters are much greater in variation then say, Immortal, with slow tempo doom metal mixed with atypical thrash beats. Though many would be pleased by the lack of persistent blast beats, Samael take their separation from standard black metal tempo to the extreme.
Samael; simply put, should have played a little faster on the album. Taking into account that blast beats can become annoying, the band would have benefited from remaining in a standard, thrash tempo for a majority of the album. For example: "Sleep of Death" begins the album quite appropriately, with venomous speed behind the talon-like guitars. After setting the pace for an adrenaline fused blood bath, the band slows the tempo to an almost plodding pace for the next few songs. Samael kicks up the thrash assault once more, only to stifle the onslaught with sloth. Frustration partially nails the coffin on this potentially groundbreaking addition to the dark library of metal.
Some of the album's impact is salvaged by Samael's skill at haunting melody and intros. Worship Him is a valuable album in exploring the early, second black metal wave; however, it is hardly a masterpiece. One could spend their money on much worse, but a score of better albums also exist.
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There's a very small, perhaps very, very slowly growing movement within the extreme community which seems to promote the idea that for an expression within extreme metal to be valid, it must be some sort of "true art" or whatever, on par with the great composers or painters or writers of the 18th or 19th century. There is considerable effort put into creating a narrative in which bands like Incantation are supposedly on the same level as Beethoven or Mozart in compositional skill, creativity, vision and impact, and for some reason these people are able to take themselves seriously and do not seem to feel ridiculous about their claims at all. It seems to function on a footing similar to those of people who in all seriousness discuss what type of reptile hybrid Barack Obama's secret service agent transformed into in that video that was briefly popular on the internet some time ago. People can believe just about anything, in any artificially created reality they just need to tell themselves as truth often enough.
What leads me to the previous particular opening paragraph for this particular album I'm reviewing is a desire to return to the roots of what drew people into extreme metal in the first place, and being honest to oneself and others about what the extreme forms of metal's core appeals are. Shall we exhibit this required level of honesty and simply admit to ourselves that, whatever artistic depth we have discovered in the style subsequently aside, what pulled us in originally, what we were looking for originally, was how vile, how disgusting, how nihilistic, how morbid, and how evil everything in extreme metal was? This overwhelming quality of overstepping all boundaries to create a force so dark and destructive, so unlike everything created before. An unholy union of qualities you wouldn't have found in any other extreme genre at the time. Sure, extreme grindcore like Anal Cunt or extreme noise like Masonna will have sounded vile and disgusting back around the time most of us discovered extreme metal, but metal didn't stop at vile and disgusting and added a lot more extreme qualities, like extremely dark atmosphere, extremely dense structure and extremely morbid riffing.
There are a number of albums from around the late 80s to early 90s that symbolised this amalgamation of extreme qualities quite perfectly, some have been or will be covered in other parts of this series. One that stands out in particular, though, when thinking of vile, disgusting, nihilistic, morbid, evil, and so forth, is Samael's debut album Worship Him. It has a sound of such pure, unadulterated darkness and such primitive brutality that only the beginnings of extreme metal (if you still count the late 80s as such) are capable of. Suffocating riffing meets an atmosphere from the depths of hell, played with such irreverence for pleasantness and mass compatibility that it was truly shocking for the context of the time of its release.
The riff writing at the core of this album sounds sort of like a cross between what would happen if you sucked any and all trace of NWOBHM out of early Venom and left only the morbidly antagonistic audial devil worship, and the life-drenching doom and gloom of Samael's unforgettable compatriots Hellhammer (and traces of early Celtic Frost.) Both Venom and Hellhammer are similarly defined by a "bulldozing" quality of their assaults on the senses, though accomplishing that sound by greatly different approaches. One relying more of the power of its riffs, the other more on sound and rhythm. Samael have decided to continue that quality and combine both approaches, while at the same time removing anything remotely positivistic or upbeat. Worship Him is not an album to have fun to. Any and all "party music" qualities of its progenitors have been mercilessly extinguished. What's left is a core of riffs that definitely harkens back to the earliest days of extreme metal, but is unforgivingly dark and evil. Exactly the type of stuff anyone who can relate to this review's first two paragraphs was looking for when first getting into extreme metal.
It isn't just the core of riffs that is so brutal and morbid in its primitivity. Both the whole songwriting process and the production process seem to follow the singular goal of sucking anything life-affirming and beautiful out of what had been in extreme metal before. Riffs are arranged in a very simple fashion, but one efficient at its destructiveness. The percussion at the same time reminds of ancient war drums and whips the listener into a frenzy of worship of the dark and evil. It helps create a certain passion that the music otherwise might have lacked, even if the lack of passion would be minimal considering the unhinged brutality of the riffs. The vocals themselves add a charme of irreverence few extreme metal vocalists could provide. The combination of all instruments drips of blasphemy, and it is irresistable to succumb to it. The rough but sharp nature of the production puts it on perfect footing to do its deed. Cutting the air like a razorblade, but foul enough to simultanously drench the atmosphere in utter darkness, it puts the extreme nature of the performance in the perfect frame to achieve its maximum efficiency. Simply perfect for this album.
As we all know, the band only maintained its level of brilliance briefly, releasing one more album that while being slightly weaker by nature of experimenting with higher levels of accessibility, still maintained many of the enduring qualities of this debut, before quickly deteriorating into some sort of circus act through the inclusion of one ill-advised idea after another, eventually packing entire albums to the brim with them. It is always a shame to see such a magnificent band lose its relevance in such a short time, but what remains is a debut album that personifies extreme metal like few others, and is an absolute masterpiece in the field.
--- Originally written for http://droneriot.blogspot.com
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Worship Him is aesthetically the full-length expansion to the style of the Medieval Prophecy EP, but the intervening years had been put to good use in prepping that and newer material for a higher production value that would, in my estimation, render it far more effective and resonant. We're still hearing what ranks among the crudest of Samael's content, but it's refined to the point that it doesn't sound like a suffocated soundboard demo from a rather mediocre rehearsal room session. This is also the most distinctly 'black metal' of their records, obvious with the daemonic cover art and occult/horror lyrical content, but I should qualify that a little further, for these Swiss did not exactly walk the same left hand path as so many of their European counterparts...
Whereas might find, in the evolution of Greek black metal, a huge influence of melodic heavy metal riffs on the older recordings of Rotting Christ, meshed in with the darker lyrical themes and harsh vocals, so too do they appear here, only they feel more strictly chord-based, like the dirtier early 80s stuff by Manowar, Witchfinder General or other legends who weren't always known for having the best of production. Burly, driving chord progressions that teeter on the predictable, but where these guys deviate is in their huge Hellhammer influence. We might argue that if anyone had a right to ape Tom G. Warrior's seminal extremity, it was his own countrymen, though by this time Darkthrone had already been shifting in this direction. That said, where Fenriz and N. Culto took those primal grooves, distorted and froze them beneath a winter moon, Vorphalack plays a lot more cleanly, with some fairly obvious riff choices even for their day (even for the late 80s). So, to an extent, I have to say I always found the guitars on this record to be among the least compelling of Samael's career, but Worship Him compensates with its slight sense of novelty...for 1991, this was pretty fucking fresh and diabolic sounding even if you couldn't get past the 50/50 hit/miss ratio of the guitars.
But definitely some heavy metal here, some of that Hellhammer/Celtic Frost primordial doom and drudge-thrash with some occasional forays into a mid-to-fast pace more reflective of what most other trailblazing black metal acts were producing (i.e. "The Black Face"). The drums were rarely 'extreme', more of a steady barrage of simple beats or double-kick batteries that supported the obsidian bluntness of the chords, with a handful of warlike cadences that I found eerily reminiscent of material from Bathory's classics Under the Sign of the Black Mark and Blood Fire Death (like those breaks in "Knowledge of the Iron Kingdom" which remind me of the title track to the latter). Masmiseîm's bass lines here are largely unimpressive, following along dully to the rhythm guitar cards with an occasional, but at least the tone helps to fatten up the slower, doomed riffing sequences. The rhythm guitar tone is not too saturated, almost at times like early Candlemass with a little more flange or reverb, some snail paced chugging, but despite the baseness of the composition they still manage to sound quite evil more often than not, because it just has no sense of foundation of melody, warmth or friendliness anywhere. Just a steady, damned march into the abyssal pits...the most peppy this gets is the vile thrashiness of a tune like "Morbid Metal".
Vorphalack really ties this all together with his snarl, and the guy has always surprised me, because in reality he has one of the least pronounced, occasionally garbled sounding harsh vocals in all that old wave of black metal. He doesn't have a ton of sustain to his rasp, nor is he the most wretched or sinister, but there's this sort of messy, 'no-fucks-given' inflection in his reverbed barks which almost makes Samael feel like some sort of snotty, highbrow black metal ritual, and I do not at all mean that as anything other than a compliment. The album speaks to me as if it's 'better than me' without the band ever even giving a fuck or trying too hard, especially as half the lyrics are depressingly simple (like the title track itself with its repetitious lines of "He is.../he is..."). Not sure if that will make much sense to anyone, but it ultimately contributes a charming, sadistic personality to what is often a fairly barebones and commonplace set of riffs exploring the more layman hybridization of black and doom, a natural extension of Hellhammer's morbidity after Celtic Frost had already more or less folded post glam-phase.
Now, this wasn't my first Samael full-length, instead one step in reverse, and it did take me some time to develop any appreciation, because in the early 90s I was still so heavily focused on the brilliance and intricacy of well-written thrash, death and power metal riffing that a lot of these slower, atmospheric-dependent records were not showpieces in my personal wheelhouse. Amazingly, this one seems to only grow more effective with age, not that it's amongst my favorite or even my half dozen favorites in this band's canon, but there's just something supremely pure and puerile about it that I can still lose myself in after so many years. The weird little touches like the ambient interlude "Last Benediction" or the pure doom instrumental "Rite of Cthulhu" only add to the gloomy, black magic aesthetic pulsing through the songwriting of the longer metal tracks. In the end, this is just one of those flawed, beloved black & white cult classics of its style...not nearly the masterpiece some stingy genre purists would paint, but an unassailable transition between the 'first wave' of European black metal (which wasn't really black metal as we know it) and the acts that would evolve that diversified darkness into its own established medium.
-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com
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Switzerland really is an unusual country. Neutral in politics and central in location, it seems to be happy enough to absorb all the influences around it and exude them in its own personal fashion. Thus is the case with its metal scene as well, which has some of the most original and unique bands in metal history. Samael is one of those bands, an ever shifting entity that has brought us so many different albums and has never been afraid of experimentation. But like any band they had to start somewhere and that place for Samael is none other than the cult classic Worship Him.
Borrowing heavily from the riffs of country mates Celtic Frost, the trio composed by brothers Xy and Vorph (here with larger spelling) and longtime bassist Mas (also under a different alias) have crafted a nice piece of pre-second wave black metal that stands on its own two feet. Yes, not all black metal comes from Norway, and as the creepy intro of "Sleep Of Death" starts one can immediately understand why this record turned into a classic. The eerie vibe emanating from the keyboards gives way for mid-paced riffs and the venomous spewing of blasphemous words that reek of a foul atmosphere. It's a small step before we're treated with the title track and the following minutes are absolutely destructive, with this simple riff being played at a really slow pace without anything but Vorph's screams of anguish in between. The main riff is one of the highlights and trademarks of this album and is sure to leave no one indifferent as its simplicity carries you along through a foggy mist into a dark castle on the top of a hill. The moment near the five minute mark where the song just suddenly gets some momentum is wonderfully crafted and shows that not all great things come from Norway, at least when it concerns black metal.
The dark mass is carried along at a sluggish pace until we reach the fastest point of this record with "Morbid Metal", a deliciously crafted piece of Darkthrone one year before them doing what they do best. It's the fastest track here and one of the few to grace us with some fast blast beats and a more Scandinavian feel. We get treated with more of this formula after a small interlude with another fast track, and then we reach the album's apex with one of Samael's hymns, "Into The Pentagram". A whole paragraph could be dedicated to this song, from the resounding drums on top a mid-paced riff accompanied by Vorph's most vitriolic vocals to the great bass lines during the pre chorus and more atmospheric parts of the song. The use of reverb on the guitar is a constant during the entire album but here is where it really shows how it can be put to great avail. This is a staple song on the band's live catalog, even after twenty years since it was put out, so if there's any highlights here this would certainly be one.
The production on this album is brilliant as each instrument shines to its utmost capacity, all clearly heard despite the bass being slightly low in the mix and that's about my only complaint to it. A few notches up and it would be perfect. The use of reverb that I mentioned before complements the clean production with an oozing and dripping feeling that is further intensified by the speed (or lack of) at which the album is played. The few and far between use of keyboards is another aspect that further enhances this experience and that's proven true with the haunting "Last Benediction", another atmospheric moment that preludes the closing song on the album, aptly entitled "The Dark", finishing this album the same way as it had started forty minutes ago with some great riffing in the vein of old Celtic Frost.
It's funny how mostly everyone considers A Blaze In The Northern Sky to be the defining moment, or better said the turning point in the passage from first to second wave of black metal. It's also funny that many would overlook Worship Him which predates said album solely based on the future efforts of the band, especially when they showcase a totally distinct approach to extreme metal. I think that this album ultimately suffers from being too in-between both waves, as it borrows the musical aspects mainly from the first but ends up being released right before the precursor of the second, despite already displaying aspects of what it would become a year later. The fact that it came out immediately before the Norwegian boom has sadly turned this into an overlooked album.
This is hardly an album that should be avoided and in fact is something worth visiting many times, given that you have a taste for mid-paced atmospheric black metal. I can see this album being a great influence for the Hellenic scene, with bands like Varathron and Rotting Christ following in its footsteps. So if you enjoy that type of black metal you should definitely check out this album. Samael would do better later on in their careers but they would hardly do anything as dark as this ever again.
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When I found this CD, in the original version, in a second hand shop I was full of joy. I've been longing for this rarity for years. It's the very first Osmose Production release and itself a rarity for musical importance in black metal. Samael are from Switzerland and they were inevitably influences by Hellhammer in that period and from the other old school, primitive realities like Venom and early Sodom.
I've always supported the idea that the black metal, the basics, don't come from the Scandinavian Peninsula, but mostly from the central part of Europe that includes also Italian bands like Necrodeath and Mortuary Drape, beside the ones I said before. Right from these bands you can understand the natural evolution of this genre in the north countries. Here, with this Worship Him album, Samael became one of the most occult and obscure bands between the first and the second wave of black metal, being from 1990.
The rhythms are never excessively fast. "Sleep of Death" is faster for the bass drum work but the guitars conserve always that muddy, dirty and occult tune that is heavily inspired by Helhammer. Also a completely doom songs like the title track or "Into the Pentagram" are completely worshiping in that sense. Sorry about the words play. The vocals are minimalist and already black metal oriented with a sick but not too extreme shriek variant. There are very similar to the ones that Abbath would have done on the Immortal debut two years later.
Anyway, what I always found really black metal in this CD is the whole atmosphere that surrounds the songs. It's completely pitch black, with no sign of light and the echoing production gives you the idea of being in a desolated cavern with these musicians, preparing for black mass. I believe that this production was very important for this new genre, and also for the future generation of depressive black metal bands. The guitars are really essential and often they play just open chords notes to be more doom and heavy, with long sounds.
The lyrics as you can see are about esoteric themes, occultism and so on. So, it's another very important thing for this genre. Basically, there aren't tracks made to be catchy but only to be excessive, shocking and completely obscure. The speed parts of "Morbid Metal" are new and unusual for the album, and exactly for this reasons, the up tempo parts are even more appreciated. Here they reminded me a lot the sounds on the Onslaught debut LP, Power From Hell.
Overall, this is a good piece of primordial black metal. It's not awesome, being still a bit immature for some parts and repetitive, but apart from these flaws, worth a listen. It's an important testimony of how black metal was evolving between the 80s and the 90s. Recommended for a history lesson in this genre and, to who already has it, it's an occasion to brush up your mind.
77/100 for the music.
90/100 for the importance.
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This is the first full-length of the great band Samael, and personally I consider it a brilliant BM work. We're not talking about the classic "True-fucking-Norwegian-black-metal", nevertheless this sounds great, excellent, from –almost- every point of view. Vorph is an evil genius, just like his brother who is the mind of the band – a band which will have a great success. Although Samael don't come from Norway, or however from the north where lots of memorable BM bands emerged in early '90, they deserve all the respect, from the beginning of their career until Solar Soul, truly the highlight of the new electronic era. It's impressive. I tried to listen first to Solar Soul and then to Worship Him; from pure light and optimism to a deep and dark black Metal opus.
A black Metal without fast and possessed drumming and with slow tempos, almost like doom Metal, vampiric vocals, some keyboards here and there, disquieting guitars and that's it. But it is extremely appreciable. The music in this album is winding, there are a lot of spells and satanic invocations –OBVIOUSLY- but instead of screaming out "SATAN SATAN OH SATAN" like the other 10000 black Metal bands in the world, Samael prefer to write cultured and well-read lyrics, and that is a typical feature of the Swiss band I dearly love.
"Sleep of Death" opens this masterpiece –yeah, I said masterpiece- and shows how Samael can be creepy and devilish: actually, the first thing you can notice are the vocals; a lot of people don't appreciate Vorph in this release, maybe because he's too weak and dull, but I really don't bother. He sings wonderfully. And so on, with the title track which is the second highlight and one of the slowest tracks in the album. The evil invocations (Belf, son of Belf, give me the power to kill at distance,) in the mid-paced "Knowledge of the Ancient Kingdom" are astonishing, the convulsive riffs in "Morbid Metal" seem to come from the depths of hell, the instrumental "Rite of Cthulhu", "Last Benediction" and "The Dark" are perfect, the slow and frightful "Into the Pentagram" shines for its perfidy -always with Vorph's screams that maintain the pathos- and the brief but very intense "Messengers of the Light" isn't less interesting; "The Black Face" is the fastest track and the umpteenth highlight. Well, I have to say that the whole album is a unique highlight with few flaws, like its repetitiveness, and they don't deserve to be considered so much.
There's the remastered version too, with a Venom cover and eight live-performed songs; I assure you that Samael are not SO bad here, but I know they could be better.
If you are a blackster and you are looking for something different from the canonical black, get this. And if you love it -I hope-, then get the other two Samael's black Metal albums, they won't disappoint you.
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I want to like this album more; I really do. Old-school Black Metal is one of my favorite things that Metal has to offer, and this album is supposed to be really important for the old Black Metal scene. Stylistically, this has a lot in common with various '80s recordings like Hellhammer's Apocalyptic Raids, Bathory's Under The Sign Of The Black Mark, and especially Sepultura's Morbid Visions. The vocal-work is great. Vorphalack has a really haunting, demonic high-pitched scream, which doesn't sound energetic or intense, but rather calculated and sinister. The guitar tone is near-perfect, with a very raw, sharp dungeon-like feel added to the riffs. The drumming is also inventive, and never does the same thing for too long. I can even listen to a song or two from here every now and then and enjoy them.
So why doesn't this get a higher rating? The vast majority of the album is extremely slow. I can't stand it most of the time when an album is filled with slower-paced songs. I don't really mind at the start of the album, as Sleep Of Death is a faster track. Then the title track comes up, and it's slow for the most part, but in a way that works; plus there are a couple faster moments spread through the song to help break up the monotony. Then Knowledge Of The Ancient Kingdom comes up, and it's another slow song. It's not horrible, but there was just a slow song before it, which sounds very similar to this one. The album doesn't really speed up until Morbid Metal starts up, and that is fast at first, but even it becomes much slower later on. The only other songs that are fast after that are The Black Face and The Dark, and the latter is an instrumental. I'm not saying that slow automatically equals bad, but in order for me to enjoy a slower song, there has to be something about it that really grabs my attention, and keeps me interested. Having a bunch of slow songs take up the majority of an album, especially when they all sound similar to a degree, is not enjoyable. I think that if Samael had sped up some of the slower songs on here, then this album would be a lot better.
I imagine that if you're into a lot of slower-paced Metal that you would like this a lot. But if you come in expecting something that's fast for the majority of the album length, then you're going to be disappointed. I just hope that someday Worship Him as a whole will click with me, and I start to consistently enjoy the album. Until then, this is going to be an album that I only listen to rarely.
Highlights: Sleep Of Death, the title track, The Black Face
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This is Samael at their earliest and most hideous spawning, which would heavily differ from the now multi-musically inspired Samael. When first rose out of the predominately French speaking side of Switzerland in the later part of the '80s they pushed out a few stillbirths, but then swayed a few misfits in the next decade with the fully developed studio recorded album: 'Worship Him.' I feel it is an album that is their darkest and most sinister in comparison to their future outputs. This was recorded almost a year prior in '90, but even when it was released in '91 by Osmose, according to the owner in a later interview I read it was even hard to sell then; possibly with a combination of a newly acquired label and newly arisen extreme metal band not setting in just yet. Which shows that what they were doing at the time was at least something different than the rest.
The album's production is dripping with evil distastefulness. It is all around audible, yet it is neither patchy nor supremely flawless, but well deserved as a dark force which is now just a long lost forethought in Samael's minds. If you travel back to the year 1984 and searched for young and extreme metal groups with an upcoming experimental approach, then Hellhammer's 'Apocalyptic Raids' should ring bells, and carry on trails of influences in its former foreboding path. This is essentially to be found on a later journey made into Samael's hellacious debut.
The first piece of damnation and the leading drive behind their songs is the guitars. The guitars, obese with heaviness, slowly goes on the Slim Fast diet as each album after this proceeds. The riffs interchange between fast pumping chugged moments, to slow palm mutes and sometimes single note doominess. The production on his guitars is mildly reverbed, but is also heavily distorted and full and thick sounding. Various pedal effects are used here and there, especially on the song 'Into the Pentagram,' there is a short section where he uses a pedal to compress the sound and alter reality on this cosmic force of interchangeable feats. Masmiseim is listed in the line-up on the album under bass player, but a few lines below it says it is instead performed by Vorphalak. It is played in clean form and basically used to highlight certain riffs by enforcing the riff pounding electric guitars.
If reverb were water, then the drums on 'W.H.' would act as a deadly presser washer and ten fold the excitement at every wet t-shirt contest it was played at. The reverb on his snare possesses a very enchanted, hall-like feel. Which sounds like the walls were slapped in a very long cathedral corridor, and then demonic monks used bells as the hi-hat equivalent. In techniques and styles, the drums range from having slow parts where the guitars along side are palm muted and ended with a few power chords. Furthermore, the drums will utilize the double bass to heighten the part when he hits a few chords, or even during their faster or mid-paced sections. He touches up on the toms and snare rolls, and creates continuous 1st degree battery on the double bass pedals once more.
The vocals are a redeeming, sinister force, also done by electric chainsawist Vorphalack. The vocals are the epitome of this evil drenched entity. They range from howls to destructive growls, which can often extend between the ambiguous palm muted riffs, and customarily end before he hits a chord. He uses a rather extended vocal projection, which fills the riffs with a limited amount of words. Rather than some previous extreme thrash bands would use a quick vocalization and fill a small space with a vast amount of words.
Samael delivered to us a couple of demos that needed sharpening and a spit-shine to polish, musically and production wise between 1987-89. An early band influenced by Hellhammer, and even going on to create simplistic riffs similar to this once monumental death-black metal band. At points, Samael shares a slightly slower playing side comparative to some material by their Swiss counterpart. However, every band has their influences, and Samael of course had their own distinct sound and diversities. They arrived at a point when bands were beginning to create a resurgence of black metal. Also at a point when more and more bands were popping up with faster drums and extended growled or raspy vocals; rather than quick and aggressive thrash type of vocalization of squeezing long phrases into a short riff structure. There was also the addition of more and more bands adding doom-like slower sections into their musical approach; probably more so with later described death metal groups. Some bands were changing and going for an abstract style of dark music, rather than an all-out physically aggressive side. Samael possessed many of these attributes, however they would indeed stand apart from others. The band on from their second debut had steadied themselves to add more consistent mid-paced sections. They also slowly dropped the reverb saturated production and in place gave themselves a more clear, present sound. In my opinion, the music does deliver on their second and third album, but when comparing the overall atmosphere of 'Worship Him,' there is a definite darker leaning more towards this. The later Samael sound swayed onto a more experimental and distant, if even classified as black metal, sound, which I'm not too fond of. Their later material also makes me fall backwards to their earlier releases and want to listen to this as a proven force of time still agreeable now.