With Chivalry of Death as their card of presentation, Italy’s new masters of necrometal Boia definitely show that Italians do it better. Here their riffs roll out with menacing speed, the drums hammer up front and boom like carefully orchestrated explosions designed to flatten all fields and the bestial vocals of Krommak threat with crazed violence and the fetid stench of a man addicted to war, garlic and Manowar.
The Manowar bit is a funny one. Boia seem to have been inspired by those New York rockers. The attitude, perhaps, the battle spirit and their stripped-down love of all things metal. Sonically though, Boia is a much more brutal affair.
Chivalry of Death opens with a morbid intro, it is brief and moist, a small space where hallucinating vocals flow along a soft melody but it subsides to quickly give way to what in the 80’s would have been categorized as a speed metal riff. Beef up the production and what you have is this brutalized version of thrash where there are no high pitch vocals and where everything, from the strings, to the drums and the vocals sound round and echoey.
Chivalry of Death drips with rare confident swagger; it is nefarious from the start and it has a rare energy; it screams 80s with its obvious love of Sodom and early Sepultura, but it plays it in a much more professional way.
As bare bones and basic as Boia‘s approach is, the playing is as tight as it can be. Listen to the blasts on Rotten 666, the shifts, the changes, the tempos and the way they escalate. It is all carefully constructed and it interlocks. Vocalist Krommak has his work cut out for him; as Boia sound massive the only solution is to rise to the occasion and his vocal approach though robust and guttural clearly articulates the vocals.
Chivalry of Death clocks in at just over 12 minutes. It packs four tracks and one intro. It’s pure battery, aural abuse. It shows no mercy for your eardrums. It’s a quick trip to the boxing ring, it leaves you battered and jonesing for more.
BOIA‘s Chivalry of Death is out on CD and Cassette on 12.15.17
