Behemoth: Devil’s Conquistadors

by Lukasz Dunaj
Metal Blade, 487 pp., $29.99

Confessions of a Heretic: The Sacred and the Profane – Behemoth and Beyond

by Adam Nergal Darski, with Mark Eglinton, Krzysztof Azarewicz & Piotr Weltrowski
Jawbone Press, 288 pp., $19.95 (paper)

Behold the age of blackened death. Twenty-five years for the former color drain, 30 turns the latter decay. Both disciplines institutionalize no less than pagan, hair, and heavy – metal. 1998’s landmark Lords of Chaos tolls Scandinavian terrorism and homicide in the name of black metal, while Decibel magazine’s Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal & Grindcore revises anew its dialectic of heavy metal gone zombie. Together, a pair of new translations from Polish, Devil’s Conquistadors and Confessions of a Heretic, fuse the two distinct genres in the name of one Adam Nergal Darksi. No quotation marks around Nergal. The corpse-painted Behemoth frontman that friends and bandmates call Ner legally adopted his metal moniker. Typically Polish graphic design razes eyeballs in the first scripture, nearly 500 pages about a black metal cultist that rose above the gladiatorial fray of Christian deniers to achieve worldwide acclaim by crossing over into death metal. Lukasz Dunaj fast-forwards the Eastern bloc, post-Communism teen’s first cassette over more than two decades to last year’s 10th album, The Satanist, recorded after Darksi beat leukemia by finding a bone marrow transplant donor via legions of metalheads. Only the very briefest of sycophant segues glue together a heroic oral history worthy of ancient hieroglyphs. Mesopotamian deity of war, pestilence, and the underworld, Nergal the First now cedes his throne to a modern-day headbanger. Confessions of a Heretic fills in all the personal data necessarily missing from Devil’s Conquistadors, with almost 300 pages of Q&A dialogued with confidants after Darski gained infamy in Poland for a) becoming a target of politically motivated religious persecution; b) tabloid dating; and c) appearing as a coach on his country’s The Voice. The autobiographical intent of Confessions sharpens the Gdansk-reared (and still -based) singer/guitarist’s well-traveled insights – “[The U.S. is] strange country. You can go to jail for drinking a beer on the street, yet everyone carries a weapon” – and anecdotes, such as being shot at on tour: “It happened in Texas.” Behemoth’s theatre of the extreme blasts 800 combined pages of blackened death metal like Gabriel blowing Armageddon.

This article appears in May 29 • 2015.

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San Francisco native Raoul Hernandez crossed the border into Texas on July 2, 1992, and began writing about music for the Chronicle that fall, debuting with an album review of Keith Richards’ Main Offender. By virtue of local show previews – first “Recommendeds,” now calendar picks – his writing’s appeared in almost every issue since 1993.