Babylon Mystery Orchestra - The Great Apostasy

The full title of this album is The Great Apostasy: A Conspiracy of Satanic Christianity. This is definitely an oddity in the metal world. Babylon Mystery Orchestra is actually just one guy - Sidney Allen Johnson, who writes, plays and produces everything, and also independently releases his albums. This is the third release from BMO, and like the two before it, it is a concept album dealing with religious themes.

The music is sort of a mix between gothic metal and traditional hard rock. There are some pompous, keyboard-accentuated goth pieces ("Holy Ghost"), some driving riff-rockers that could almost have come from AC/DC ("Prey for Me"), near-power ballads with clean guitar and epic choruses ("One Way, One Truth, One Life"), and a three-part epic with a Doors-influenced intro leading into a fast-paced rocker which leads into a symphonic instrumental ending ("Antichrist Superczar"). All of this without ever getting too technical, though there are some good arrangements and a handful of tasteful guitar solos in the classic rock tradition.

Johnson is a true believer, and his conspiracy theory here is that the church has been infiltrated and corrupted by Satan, and what most of us see as the official institution of Christianity is, in fact, a corruption of it. What follows is an indictment of organized religion that wouldn't be out of place on a black metal album, except that Johnson is coming at it from the other direction. Obvious targets like religious hypocrites and pedophile priests are attacked, but also the divisiveness of religious beliefs is noted as an attempt by Satan to confuse humanity and draw them away from the "one" truth. One of the more perplexing songs is "Eye of the Needle": the first verse condems a gay Episcopal priest for apparently confusing sexual love with godly love, but then the second verse also condems the Rev. Fred Phelps, whose church has become infamous for demonstrating at the funerals of U.S. soldiers, claiming that the soldiers' deaths are God's punishment for America's increasing tolerance of homosexuals (I'm not making this up - they really believe this).