A tribute to Phantom’s “Fallen Angel” masterpiece? Of course not, this is war metal, and in war metal the only Phantom you are allowed to recognise is “Divine Necromancy” (basically, low-fi static noise with blast beats). It’s one of those “rules of war metal,” just like how your album cover can’t feature colours other than red, white and black, so to can you not draw inspiration from anything that’s not “Divine Necromancy,” “Drawing Down the Moon” or “Onward to Golgotha.” And very few actually opt for the last, and most complex, one, almost all war metal posers preferring the first two for the “minimalism” (read: it’s easy to play and we gotz no talent, dawg).

The music on “Fallen Angel of Doom” is sort of the same garbage you’d find on Black Witchery’s “Inferno of Sacred Destruction” or any random Archgoat or Revenge turd, to say nothing of Teitanblood… chromatic power chord grinding “riffs.” Forever.

It’s way too hard to really differentiate the songs from one another because they all sound exactly the same. Seriously, the entire 30 minutes of “Fallen Angel of Doom” sound like an insanely long song repeating the same riffs over and over again.

War metal… why must you suck so?

Simplicity is synonymous with black metal, I get that. With classic albums such as “Memento Mori” and “Hvis Lyset Tar Oss” coming out of Norway around the same time as this, if not a little later, black metal is not supposed to be an insanely technical style of music – although it can be, as seen on the brilliant “Verminlust.” Is that a bad thing? Absolutely not. But, at the very least, the other bands releasing minimalist black metal albums knew how to differentiate the songs and change the damn riffs every so often.

Oh, and Blasphemy’s lyrics aren’t special either. Not a huge deal, as the whole “HAIL SATAN” thing was common for early war metal anyway, but even then you’d still try to avoid the “hollywood satanism” cliché… rather than fully embrace even its most risible aspects, as Blasphemy does on “Fallen Angel of Doom.”

Even songs like “Weltering in Blood” which are not as fast and stupid sounding as the others are still painfully boring, mainly due to the lacking of inspiration in riffcraft, and the rather poor manner in which these admittedly mediocre riffs are arranged. The drumming throughout the album is completely one-sided and uninspired. Blast beats are pretty much the only type of drums you will hear. They’re not really that fast either, not even Marduk level blasting. Just mid-paced, slower blast beats that still really do absolutely nothing in terms of variation or excitement.

In closing, I really don’t understand why this album “Fallen Angel of Doom” is considered so “influential” – aside from the fact that it was one of the earliest war metal releases, in 1990 and all that. But hear me now: even if Blasphemy were some sort of war metal pioneers, some sort of black metal revolutionaries, their work has been bettered by almost every band to follow them. This album is so boring that you will literally feel like shit for wasting 30 minutes of your life listening to it. Replace with Warkvlt’s “Bestial War Metal,” the album “Fallen Angel of Doom” tries so hard to be, or barring that at least get yourself a copy of the much superior “Withdrawal.” You won’t regret it.