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BASTARD CRÖSS
Crossripper

Morbid And Miserable (2025)
Rating: 7/10

After a brace of EPs and split projects, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based black thrashers Bastard Cröss decide to spew out a nasty full-length debut album on Halloween. Armed with inverted crosses and adorned in leather, the blasphemous gang of four drags its audience through a frashy, trashy and formulaic blend of speeded up New Wave Of British Heavy Metal and hellish fury.

If you dig rusty metal like Midnight then the songs here will surely appeal. Sure, one knows what’s lurking around the corner with each track to an extent although the glam-tinged ‘Demons At Midnight’ also fuses thrash and U.S. power metal via the theatrical fire of Lizzy Borden. The hilariously named Blasphemous Axe (guitar and vocals), Heathen Chevalier (guitar and vocals), Beheader Of Priests (bass) and Infernal Bastard (drums) creates a sulphuric cauldron which, when stirred, produces a Motörhead-styled punkiness (‘Parasitic’) alongside Toxic Holocaust.

The foursome also touches upon a vicious South American style of underground bellowing and snapping, successfully courting raw and primitive designs doused in dual vocal evil that might startle a few of the local Women’s Institute members. However, there’s nothing here that we haven’t heard before as ‘Lycan Knights’ drips with a Toxic Holocaust menace and the title cut snaps like classic Sodom.

I love the tales the band coughs up though, ranging from a parasite-littered village to a mummified corpse rising from its tomb (‘Sarcophagus’). Satanic wafts of early Slayer fill the nostrils as the band resorts to impure savagery on closer ‘Behead The Priest’ and the venomous ‘Phantom Pestilence’.

I’ve no doubt the intention is to shove serious unholy graveyard metal down our throats, but for all of its attempts at archaic anarchy Crossripper is just bestial buffoonery and I like it.

Neil Arnold

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