I was really looking forward to this release because I heard it was going to be something special, unlike anything another band has ever done before. Hellucinate, the band’s previous album, blew me away two years ago and I was hoping Impious would pull this off again.

Let’s first talk about the concept behind Holy Murder Masquerade. The booklet of the cd contains a comic about a serial killer who goes around killing people, has visions and makes confessions to a priest. The comic is divided in eleven chapters which correspond with the eleven songs on the album. Everything said by the characters in the comic is translated to the lyrics in these songs. It’s a really cool and original idea, which makes the album fun to listen to and read with at the same time.

On the other hand the concept idea took away a lot of the spontaneous and brutal riffs that Hellucinate did contain. I get the feeling that during the song writing process a lot of the songs were too much forced to fit the story and that caused the band to use riffs they otherwise wouldn’t have used. Just when listening to ‘Death On Floor 44’, ‘Three Of One’ and ‘Everlasting Punishment’ I got the same energetic feeling I had when I first heard Hellucinate.

Holy Murder Masquerade therefore disappointed me a little bit. It’s still a good album and with the whole concept thing and a few really good songs. It’s easily better than all the copycat metalcore bands nowadays, but it doesn’t top Hellucinate by a long shot.