SKULL71

ACHERON, Satanic Supremacy (2008, Frozen Darkness Productions)

The skull:
Just the straight-up Totenkopf insignia of the Nazi SS. As if the association wasn’t obvious enough, the initial “S”es in the title are rendered in the sig runes used by the Schutzstaffel as well. You’d be forgiven for thinking Acheron were some kind of racist NS band, but as far as I know, they’re just ridiculous Satanists trying to make some kind of point.

The music:
Acheron is one of those bands that’s just always been around. I’ve been dutifully passing over their albums in used CD bins for my entire life as a heavy metal enthusiast. They’re hardly the worst band out there, but their no-frills, old school death metal just doesn’t so anything for me. When I tracked down some mp3s of this cassette, I initially assumed it was one of their early demos, maybe from the late 80s, before realizing this is, shockingly, a recording from 2008. It’s a cassette tape for fuck’s sake! From 2008. You’d never know it from the sound, or the music, or the lyrics, which are of high school quality, that this was produced so recently. It cannot be said that Acheron don’t stick to their guns, though, as this demo pushes the same mid-tempo Tampa DM sound the band has been working since the beginning (even if they’re doing it from Ohio, now.) All three of these songs were rerecorded for the band’s next (and to date latest) album, so I guess if you want to hear them with a little more polish, you can listen to them on The Final Conflict: Last Days of God. But, I doubt you do.
— Friar Johnsen