PEST “The Crowning Horror”

PEST
“The Crowning Horror”
(Agonia)
I have not been in touch with PEST’s black metal for a very long time. Sometime in the 90s I bought a 12” by them and ever since then I’ve stood on the outside not even looking in on every album that they have released since. But now it is time for me to head first dive into the new album by Sweden’s PEST. My first thought was that this was going to be a Marduk light kind of album but it turned out to be false. There is an old school kind of feeling to this without it going all retro on me. But it do remind me of a time when black metal wasn’t really what it is today and you could be into extreme metal without it being labelled anything else. So if this makes me think of speed metal it all fits in. This is like a sample of all the metal that I grew up on in the 80s. But that is not the reason alone why I like this. I like this because of the songs. There is a charm to them that is hard to resist. Anders Ekdahl