Manifest is Impaled Nazarene's tenth studio album in the band's eighteen years of existence, not to mention the live albums, splits, singles, videos, compilations and whatnot. And yet, I wonder what has changed and what have they been doing all these years if they sound the way the do on Manifest.

Owning and remembering the sound of their first four albums, the band either went through a major devolution process, or they have been slumbering for many years. What's more is that Manifest is indeed exactly that: a manifest for the poor and obnoxiously short-sighted side of metal, where stagnation, groundless self-adoration, infantilism, shallowness and mindless repetition are the idols of worship.

Impaled Nazarene's futile and empty arrogance is smeared all over Manifest. They are the kings of the world and everybody else is a worthless pig who deserves to die. What's more is that they are sticking to their punk-oriented, watered down black metal of old, not only blatantly echoing their former albums, but also repeating the same riffs over and over again throughout this album - what ultimately results in a pretty much monolithic album with only glimpses of creativity and singularity too sparse to make a difference, a formula repeated to death by the band themselves, but obviously, someone is not tired yet of being their own copycats for so many years....

The English lyrics are poor both in language level as well as content, and are rather idiotic, to say the least. Apparently, these thirty-something musicians are not yet tired of dealing with goats, nuclear warheads, and Satan, like they did in their adolescence.

However, the music has this rock n' roll attitude which I like, something that often makes me forget all the aforementioned major downsides and just enjoy some black n' roll coupled with Mika Luttinen's ever-charismatic and unique rasps, which are definitely the highlight of the album and its driving force.

I've always liked much more anything Luttinnen has done in the electronic musical field rather than his metallic efforts with Impaled Nazarene (Diabolos Rising being my favorite), and Manifest does not change that the least. If anything, it only makes me a tad more skeptical towards the necessity of this entity to exist, when it has not introduced to the extreme metal world anything significant in a very long while....

The copy I review is the Red Stream Records version, licensed by Osmose Production for North America.

written by Chaim Drishner

Playing time: 50:28