Century Media – 27th March 2026
Christopher Nosnibor
Pentagram-shaped goat heads adorn Hellripper’s website and Bandcamp. “All hail the goat” is a band slogan of sorts, and is emblazoned on the body of the compact disc, which depicts a goat in an approximation of a lion rampant stance, thus combining James McBain’s strongly Scottish identity (the album comes in ‘Wild Thistle’ pink, ‘Saltaire’ blue, ;’Highland Mist’ grey and ‘Black Cuillin’ vinyl editions’ and Baphomet, adopted as something of a mascot within the black metal community since the dawn of the genre with Venom’s Black Metal in 1982, and Bathory’s genre-defining eponymous debut in ’84. there’s a giant goat forged from mist and cloud on the moody, mountainous cover art, too.
The ‘one-man black/speed metal band formed by Scottish musician James McBain in 2014’ has been crowned ‘Scotland’s King of the arcane mosh’ by Metal Hammer magazine, with a style which is very much rooted in 80s black metal, and, as the Hellripper website states, ‘heavily inspired by witchcraft and the supernatural, Hellripper is also deeply rooted in its Scottish origins, using the landscape and historical events as a backdrop for its lyrics and imagery’.
Coronach is Hellripper’s fourth full-length album, and features eight riff-ripping songs with a total run time of forty-four solo-centric minutes. The instant ‘Hunderprest’ powers in at a hundred miles an hour, McBain is straight in with the flamboyant fretwork, and some of it is just wildly excessive. ‘Less is more’ is not a motto Hellripper abide by. But the riffs themselves are killer, and she snarling, rasping vocals may be of the genre, but add to the gnarliness of the dark whirlwinds which blast through each and every song. The pace is relentlessly fast and furious and the style cohesive throughout.
That said, as much as I say that this is ‘of the genre’, Coronach does show ambition and awareness when it comes to composition and arrangement: ‘The Art of Resurrection’ starts with a delicate, atmospheric piano passage, while the title track includes Sir Walter Scott’s poem of the same title (Scott was Scottish) and bagpipes (of course).
‘Baobhan Sith (Waltz of the Damned)’, the first of the album’s two bona fide epics, with a span of six and a half minutes, rounds of the first half, and with the fancy fretwork reined in (a bit, at least) in favour of driving riffery, it’s a powerful, pounding beast of a tune, while the title track, which draws the curtain on the album, is a towering, monumental nine-minute monster which goes all-out anthemic and which flies the flag of tartan black metal with pride.
AA
Aural Aggravation 