Akercocke is currently being hailed by British metal-press as the new extreme metal sensation. The 5-piece band was formed in 1997 and their ‘99 debut album Rape of the Bastard Nazarene got excellent reviews. Consequently the band was offered a record deal with Peaceville not long after. On their second album Goat of Mendes Akercocke display a variety of different styles. At first it seems as if the band has randomly picked elements from grindcore as well as death & black metal and has thrown these all in a big blender. As a result the 12 songs on the album appear to lack a certain coherence or uniformity. But why all the fuzz about this band? Maybe it’s because of the fact that the compositions are unpredictable and sometimes even suprising. For the listener these offer little to go by, and this is not necessarily meant in a negative way.

The paradox being that on one hand Akercocke tries to hold the listener’s attention with unexpected breaks, tempo and atmospheric alterations and a mixture of black, death and grindcore passages. On the other hand they are running the risk of slackening attention because a certain directive or guideline to connect the various songs seems to be missing. If Akercocke had left out the sometimes somewhat miss-placed or overstrained extras (clean vocals/chants/clumsy leads etc) and had concentrated on offering a extremely aggressive mixture of grindcore and blackmetal (as in for instance ‘Masks of God’, ‘Infernal Rites’ or ‘Breaking Silence’) Goat of Mendes would have been on hell of an album. Nevertheless the album is definitely worth checking out as the band has dared to not just merely follow the trodden paths within extreme metal.