Goatwhore – ‘Angels Hung From the Arches of Heaven’ [Album Review]

For a quarter of a century, Goatwhore has been smashing out their thrash-tinged extreme metal with little fuss or fanfare. So, with the release of their latest album, Angels Hung From The Arches of Heaven, it’s refreshing to see that even after twenty-five years, the band hasn’t strayed too much from their path.

An album so ridiculously metal you almost expect it to arrive wrapped in studs; every single thing about Angels Hung From The Arches of Heaven drips with evil. A ferocious display which rarely takes its foot off the gas, the Louisana shredders waste no time once the intro bleeds out, hurtling straight into “Born of Satan’s Flesh.” Muscle-loosening grooves are packed tightly between a barrage of savage riffs, the kind of which instantly sink into your skull with Louis B. Falgoust II howling away over to the top of the metallic mayhem.

“Death From Above,” a song loosely based around a group of female Soviet aviators in a bomber division deployed in 1942, rattles along at what should be an illegal pace while the title track sees the band temper their metallic rage with a sinister air. An utterly savage mix of thrash, death and black metal, the likes of “Ruinous Liturgy” and “Voracious Blood Fixation” may come straight from the textbook of old-school, traditional extreme metal but listening to Ben Falgoust barking his sinister lyrics like a man possessed over a barrage of balls-to-the-wall metal should get you throwing horns with a massive demented grin on your face.

As this punishing display of extreme metal batters through each track, from the evil grooves of “The Devil’s Warlords” to the spine-breaking pace of “Nihil,” you can almost picture yourself in a grotty bar, fist clenched, drenched in sweat, banging your head like there is no tomorrow to this hellish soundtrack. Sure, Goatwhore may not have veered too far from their raging formula throughout the years, although, by their own admission, working with Kurt Ballou has opened them up to new ideas. That being said, this is Goatwhore, and you wouldn’t want for wholesale changes to their face-tearing sound when the end result is an album as ferocious and downright black-souled as this one.

Angels Hung From The Arches of Heaven Track Listing:

1. Invocation
2. Born of Satan’s Flesh
3. The Bestowal of Abomination
4. Angels Hung from the Arches of Heaven
5. Death from Above
6. Ruinous Liturgy
7. Victory is the Lightning of Destruction
8. Voracious Blood Fixation
9. The Devil’s Warlords
10. Weight of a Soulless Heart
11. Nihil
12. And I Was Delivered from the Wound of Perdition

Run Time: 47:11
Release Date: October 7, 2022
Record Label: Metal Blade Records