There is something undeniably pedantic about one-track albums. Very few bands are capable of creating a musical arc that genuinely absorbs a full-length running time in one complete work. Even the highly regarded Green Carnation’s much-loved Light of Day, Day of Darkness felt like distinct movements in which lumping everything together was unnecessary and a little pretentious. What on earth does this have to do with route-one Satanic Singaporean blackened thrashers Impiety? Well, this is the form that Worshippers of the Seventh Tyranny takes, bizarrely enough. Not only that, but they have the cheek to name the sole track ‘I-Vii’. The implication: ‘Yeah, there are seven songs here, but fuck you, work out where each one starts for yourself’.

I tried to decipher where the transitions were but had about 6 turning points by the 20-minute halfway mark so gave up. And that fact alone tells you something interesting about this record: in comparison to 2009’s blistering fast and filthily black metal Terroreign, this is a surprisingly diverse creation. Opening with a weirdly electronic fade-in which sounds like it could begin an avant-garde industrial album, we are swiftly plunged into a haywire blackened thrash tirade which quickly builds to ecstatic heights of a raucous, crackling lead guitar solo.

But after opening with a bang, Impiety then stride bravely into an array of transitions and segues, exploring at great length the band’s long-surpressed slower side. The opening grinds suddenly down into a clunkingly slow doom-death groove which lasts for the next five minutes. This groove is a remarkable thing and clearly one of the album’s best ideas; it forms the underpinning for a spookily effective dual lead guitar melody, before proceeding to get angrier and angrier until it starts to sound like something that could fit on Triptykon’s record from last year.

But this is all in the first third, and may be a case of peaking far too soon. Often, the slower tempos here don’t quite convince. In the sixteenth minute Impiety stumble into pure 80s worship, with a deformed quasi-doom riff inspired by Hellhammer forming a strange juxtaposition with the rather modern ideas which have anticipated it. This passage loops round for quite a long time, and simply feels like an unnecessary release of tension.

So Worshippers of the Seventh Tyranny feels quite different from the frantic blackened thrash band of Terroreign and Kaos Kommand. It feels more mature- though in this type of music is that such a compliment? After the opening flourish of thrash violence, those energetic peaks are few and far between, until the last third when the band recapitulate them. It is, for sure, a pleasant surprise to see Impiety revealing an experimental side and I think potentially there are superb results to be generated. But unfortunately Worshippers of the Seventh Tyranny simply suffers too much from the lack of their signature tyrannical, mouth-frothing blackened thrash. They end on a fade-out as well: a forty minute metal epic deserves more than that.