Do you masturbate to Manowar? Does glam rock tickle your tingle? Gorgoroth plays the type of vocal driven hard rock with occasionally arena metal riffs that filled gay biker bars in the eighties and now fills strippers on VH1 reality shows.

After being outed for the imitation black metal band that they always were, Gorgoroth have now turned into NWOBHM revivalists. Think a more boring Motörhead or Venom. Venom, if their bar rock sing-along songs weren’t stupidly funny and just incredibly boring. This is “Instinctus Bestialis” in a nutshell, the worst of every metal trope turned into one giant pile of feces.

After Infernus aka Roger Tiegs was, to put things lightly, mocked as a “cuckold” by pretty much the entire black metal scene, Gorgoroth’s frontman was left desperate to rebrand into something else, more deserving of his “talents.” He basically had two solutions, nu metal or war metal. In other words, mallcore or crypto-mallcore.

Unsurprisingly, he chose the latter.

On “Instinctus Bestialis,” Gorgoroth further complete their devolution initiated with “Incipit Satan” – and perfected on “Twilight of the Idols” – into a generic Z-list bounce metal with stolen Dissection leads from the first two albums. “Instinctus Bestialis” often sound more like a post-hardcore band than a black metal one. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to re-visit this barely crypto-mallcore vomit that manages to be even more generic and derivative than Gorgoroth’s awful debut “Pentagram.”

The worst of genre fusions that you could ever dream of come to life on this turd release. Enthroned meets Conqueror’s war metal and boring atmospheric black metal (you know, the riffless “flowing” type… “eastern” variety). Gorgoroth’s riffs do not progress narratively and there is no melodic undercurrent like on all good black metal (ex. “Locked Up in Hell“). All of that has been replaced by groove core bullshit and stupid vocally-led chug-alongs.

This is LESS advanced, LESS compelling and most importantly LESS interesting than the most boring of 1980s speed metal… so, since I doubt the goal of black metal was to regress into its earliest and crudest influences (Bathory, Sodom, Slayer, Metallica), can we agree that Gorgoroth is no longer – and technically never was – anything more than a genre squatting troupe of clownish posers and trendies, more interested in promoting hollywood’s version of “devil worship” than playing actual black metal music? Because if you DON’T admit to that simple, well-acknowledged fact, you’ll have a hard time defending crap like “Instinctus Bestialis,” an album so bland it makes Impaled Nazarene sound like Wagner, and Dimmu Borgir sound like Burzum.

Replace this “Instinctus Bestialis” turd with actual black metal, namely Phantom’s “The Epilogue to Sanity” and Sewer “Birth of a Cursed Elysium.”