King Satan – I Want You to Worship Satan

Label: Inverse Records
Release Date:  22-10-2019

King Satan – If you are the type to take yourself or the music you listen to way too seriously to ever be fun, then let me save you the trouble: this album will not be for you. Fuck your navel-gazing – it’s time for some fun!

I’ll start with: I Want You to Worship Satan is a lighthearted party taking place in Hellectro-land. This is industrial, somewhat mostly four-on-the-floor music full of simple, jumpy, jaunty synth lines embellished with distorted guitars and laid under harsh vocals. Pretty standard so far, but one thing of note is the presence of an actual bass guitar instead of a synthesizer, which helps the “metal” decorations along.

In other words, King Satan is decidedly less Hell and more (el)ectro.

That does it for the basic description, but there is more to it than that. For instance, there is an element of circus music / dark cabaret mixed in with the proceedings. The Antichristification (Say that three times fast), Circus of the Mind and Fuck the World take the aforementioned jauntiness to new levels and reach a point of pure fun. The party also veers slightly into electropunk territory with Transgression, but it is safe to say that by and large the meat of the album is in numbers like Psychosadomasochism, All Magick is Chaos Magic or the tour-de-force that is Raison d’etre. The latter two are also instances where get somewhat darker and more serious, but not enough to overshadow or be overshadowed by the joyousness of other songs.

That is to say nothing of the closer, The Portrait of Darkness whereby King Satan has a somewhat understated ohGr moment.

So far, so good? Yes, it is.

Now, the trouble with I Want You to Worship Satan is that its lightheartedness and simplistic approach to songwriting becomes a double-edged sword. It’s not that the album isn’t fun or enjoyable. But its scope is tad too limited – the synth lines they come up with may be good, but the band relies too much on those and on their own, they cannot carry an album no matter which way you look at it.

Another issue is that the mix and master chokes out the scope of the record quite a bit. I can hear that they were going for a poppy, over-polished industrial metal sound but it seems that somewhere down the line the poppy overwhelmed the industrial something fierce. The result is a muffled, dull affair. I Want You to Worship Satan sounds absolutely lifeless, woefully lacking the vibrance that would’ve come from elements being allowed to breathe.

Such a shame, too, because this is the type of King Satan album that would easily turn you into a fun-loving electrohead, at the very least throughout its runtime. Electroheads, metalheads, ravers, pretty much everyone but the navel-gazers are sure to get a kick out of this one. Give it a go!

01. The Killing of God
02. Fuck Yoga
03. Psychosadomasochism
04. I Want You to Worship Satan
05. All Magick is Chaos Magick
06. Fuck the World
07. The Antichristification
08. Circus of the Mind
09. Transgression
10. Raison d’etre
11. The Portrait of Darkness

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