Bastard Priest - Ghouls of the Endless Night (2011)

   Bastard Priest was formed in the early '00s, and debuted as a strongly thrash influenced old school death metal band. Their music and sound reminds to the most ancient bands of the genre such as Master, old Sepultura or Pestilence. 
   After their promising and also quite heavy and devastating debut "Under the Hammer of Destruction" the band returned with a bit more thrash oriented album. It slipped closer to thrash mainly because it didn't sound so extremely dirty like the first album. Still it could serve as excellent background noise for some haunted crypt horror concept. If it's about the themes, plenty of bands could be named as possible influences from Entombed to Autopsy, since on the side of the dominant intensity, speed switches also could be found. The combination of basic themes and the unfriendly sound strictly and effectively unifies the album, but there's exciting diversity to find under the heavily ominous mist that created this dirty unitedness, and this could serve as a source of multiply possible references. This is the very core of the ancient sound of extreme metal, that bands like Death Breath, Sinners Burn, or  Excoriate also succeded to recall authentically. Bastard Priest's excellence lies partly in that authentic approach, and partly in being able to manage it to sound heavy enough even in nowadays extreme scene compared to the recent tendencies and progression of the genre.