Panchrysia - Malicious Parasite
Soulreaper Records
Black Metal
8 songs (44:48)
Release year: 2004
Reviewed by Jason

Hailing from Belgium, Panchrysia is back with their second full-length album Malicious Parasite. Though the foursome (Zharim, Web, Joris, and Dol) manage in delivering a highly malicious sound through fiery blast beats and crushing guitars, they, unlike their influences, don’t succeed in taking their sound to a new, spine tingling level. There is nothing worse than seeing a band that has potential to be unique fall victim to a generic sound because they borrowed too heavily from their influences.

To me, it sounds as if Panchrysia tried to use Emperor’s chilling cavernous sound, combine it with Impaled Nazarene brutality, and to top it off, replace solos with high-pitched strumming. The first tune Brave Black World is a perfect overview of the album. It begins with an “eerie” intro that explodes into a flurry of blastbeats, repetitious strumming and highly energized vocals that bear strong resemblance to Impaled Nazarenes’. The beat change-ups in this tune are occasional, but instead of relieving the song of its speedy monotonic drumming it serves more as an annoyance because the repetitious strumming is more accentuated.

There we go… that’s the a description of Brave Black World… and quite frankly the rest of the album. Well, I’m exaggerating a little, but it’s almost ridiculous how each song bears such resemblance to one another. Before writing this review I listened to Malicious Parasite several times for about 2 weeks, and to be honest, if I were to fast-forward to the middle of any song I’d have a lot of trouble naming it or differentiating one song from another; In fact, the opening riffs for Brave Black World and Ethical Vortex are almost identical and become equally tiring after a few listens.

What make bands like Darkthrone, Immortal, and Emperor Black Metal masters are their amazing musical talent, style, and ability to make it sound as if their music came from the deepest pits of hell. Panchrysia seems to be going for the same style, but there is virtually nothing bone chilling about their dungeon-esque sound effects and little in terms of impressive and interesting use of instruments. Repetitive riffs, simplistic hammering drums, and sub-par production.

Overall, Malicious Parasite is worth a try if you are a diehard black metal fan; but I’m sure most would agree that listening to this album for prolonged periods of time would eventually become galling to the ears.

Listen to at your own risk!

Killing Songs :
Brave Black World.... if i had to choose
Jason quoted 63 / 100
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