Divine, Desecrate, Complete is the new album of Swedish blackmetallers Misteltein. In the back of my mind remembering the review of last year’s debut album my expectations weren’t that high. Still I hope that Misteltein are able to blast away my prejudices with their new album. It starts out quite promising with fast blastbeats in ‘Bloodline Desires’ which is an indication of the major difference between this new album and their debut Rape in Rapture. Divine, Desecrate, Complete is a big step forward in aggression and power. But at what cost?! The nine tracks that contain more or less the same songstructures and as far as the guitar and keyboard arrangements are concerned nothing exciting happens, except for maybe the deathmetal-like riffing in ‘Thy Kingdom Cum’.

The album drags us along across the over-throdden paths of the blackmetal genre and no side-ways, not even tiny ones, are taken. The band’s objective when writing this album was probably not to create the most innovative blackmetal album ever but a little less predictability and a little more originality in combination with the aggressiveness and power the band does indeed offer, could have resulted in so much more.