After some introduction noise, a combination of military drumming, coughing and shouting soldiers and some cracking vinyl, Impaled Nazarene continues from where it left on its last album. After a while though, the album becomes much more diverse then its predecessor. Manifest is already the tenth album by Impaled Nazarene in its 17 years of existence. During their long career the band wrote at least 170 songs, so the track titles on this album tend to lack some originality. Still, a name like Mushroom truth is funny enough.

As always, Mika’s vocals are fairly recognizable, shouting and filthy. With some imagination, his lyrics are clearly audible. The drumming is fast and bashing and has a somewhat hollow sound. Guitars are raging and screaming and produce lots of great guitar solos reminding to for example Judas Priest. Sadly, some of the ultra fast solos also bring Children of Bodom to mind, being too clinical, too much showing of, instead of adding some feeling or atmosphere.

The somewhat metallic bass guitar is audible for a change and together with the electric guitars, they are the strength of the albums diversity. Some more variation is caused by a warm, haunting organ part and some Warcraft computer game battle sounds (always reminding me to Bal-Sagoth). A negative point of the album is the repetition, on each track, each riff is played over and over again and is totally exhausted before beginning with a new riff. The above named diversity causes this monotonous riffing to fade somewhat though.

Impaled Nazarene hasn’t lost its attitude or energy en goes on with fury. Manifest is a strong album with more dynamics and variation then the last few albums. Now sing along with the suicide song!