Within the realm of "bestial" black/death metal, you can either get a lifeless, tuneless carbon copy of Blasphemy or Beherit with nothing approaching the uniquely vile personalities of those iconic bands, or you can be fortunate enough to come across a band that seizes upon the inherent insanity and chaos of that sound, but pursues their own violent vision. Bestial Raids can be counted among the latter.

This blast of noxious savagery finally gets a repress on both CD and vinyl with an improved layout, the latest album from these Polish blackened death metallers, who at various points have shared members with the likes of Doombringer and Cultes Des Ghoules. On older releases like their Order Of Doom 7", Bestial Raids played their blackened death metal so chaotically that it became an awesome mess of evil noisecore. But Prime Evil Damnation finds them tightening their sound a bit, although this is still a full-on assault of chaotic barbarism, with some supremely fucked-up soundscapes and violent weirdness threaded through the album. Those echoes of the Canuck war metal sound pioneered by Conqueror reverberate through Bestial Raids sound, of course, but they put their own depraved, psychedelic spin on that extreme aesthetic, their songs lurching from frenzied blastbeat-riddled blast-assaults into slamming off-kilter dirges and churning breakdowns, and occasionally slipping into bizarre droning deathscapes laced with what sounds like a monstrous, malformed pipe organ; that delirious, demented vibe is also created by the singer's vomitous echo-laden shrieks (which are backed by additional guest vocals from members of Black Witchery), and the way that they layer their music at times with a low-frequency industrialized rumble that fills out the noisy, cacophonic din, like on the suffocating closer "Triumphant Primordial Darkness".

Yeah, this is not your typical Baphometic war metal outfit. Many of the traits are there, but Bestial Raids blanket this stuff in a stranger sort of Satanic filth. For those who can't get enough of the blasphemous blast of bands like Revenge, Teitanblood, Antediluvian, Diocletian, Nuclearhammer, and Black Witchery, these guys deliver the goods with their levels of hateful energy cranked into the red, and fueled by a perverted creativity that elevates this far above the rest of the goathordes. This reissue is further enhanced by the evil, surrealistic artwork of Croatian artist Marko Marov, who adorns the album in monstrous pen and ink illustrations.