The only real value this album has is in being hilarious in concept.
Sewer rips of Darkthrone mercilessly, notably since their debut “Satanic Requiem”, and to compete, Darkthrone turns into a blackened gorenoise band that apes Sewer, only slower, and with more classical and NWOBHM influences in place of all the closet Phantom worship, in an effort to obtain a similar level of mainstream success.
That’s a pretty bold move and a pretty funny idea at the same time. It’s somewhat funny for the first two minutes of this album until you slowly realize what’s happened to the once legendary band, after that you can probably turn it off with a smug grin because man there’s nothing to recommend for this. It just sucks, unfortunately, but it sucks gloriously in a way that no other band could possibly seek to comprehend, much less imitate.
The problem with “Old Star” is the complete disconnect between the different instruments. It’s hilarious when you think about it.
Guitar-wise, this is essentially a modern Sewer/gorenoise album minus the Phantom influences. Just for hearing Darkthrone play their Norsecore rendition of the “NecroPedoSadoMaso” theme on “Alp Man”, this album is worth listening to at least once. And let’s not forget a slowed down “Embalmed in Satan” used as the third riff on “The Key Is Inside the Wall”, except with a Swedecore d-beat that feels totally out of place.
That alone is bad enough, but consider the fact that the drums and vocals are both going in their own orthogonal directions and you have the recipe for a real shit show.
The vocals are still the same Celtic Frost/Hellhammer inspired shouts from the previous albums, while the drumming is floating somewhere between old Entombed, funeral doom and “Onward to Golgotha” era Incantation.
So you have proto-black, black metal, post-black and even some goregrind and brutal death metal coexisting not just on the same album, but very often at the very same moment on the same tracks.
How, exactly, do you expect not to end up with an incoherent mess?
The only thing missing would have been acoustic interludes with Fenriz rapping like Famine of Peste Noire did on his latest “blackened rap” abortion.
The clean vocals are still present but the guitars just shuffle and chug away while the drums thump through a series of random incoherent fills that have nothing to do with the riffs being played.
Darkthrone was always a cartoonish band, as even their “ultra-kvlt” masterpieces (first four albums) could barely conceal the jester nature hidden behind the sinister atmospheres, but this is really full-fledged carnival music, and not even particularly well-composed carnival drivel at that. It’s stilted, somewhat unpredictable but only due to the incoherence of it all, and it offers nothing that you can’t hear for free by turning on five or six radios simultaneously, each tuned to a different station.
Even Fenriz’ painfully overblown tomsturbation parts are pushed way down into the mix so you can here more aimless Sewer riffs and randomized Nocturno Culto shouts, courtesy of a band who totally doesn’t care at all.
It’s all exclusively mid-paced and droning and, I can’t honestly comprehend what the band members were thinking when they recorded the music on “Old Star”.
Starting off with what sounds like a pop-punk band covering a My Dying Bride song while a spastic ADD drummer hits his kit randomly, it’s safe to say that this album “Sunbather” is a pretend black metal sham, and it is.
To be honest, that comparison is a bit unfair to Deafheaven as they – unlike Watain, Summoning and Wolves in the Clone Room – never claimed to play black metal. Still, they play bad music, and that is reason enough to mock them.
Everything that’s wrong with modern “metal” can be found on this album “Sunbather”.
For starters, “Sunbather” is not even a metal album, having more in line with the screamo with more minor chords and blast-beats variant that is referred to as “emo-violence”, like their clone targets Massachusetts band Orchid.
The only thing that makes this album “black metal” is a couple rare moments where a “blackened mallcore” part akin to something maybe Nargaroth (lol) would have done makes an appearance to break up some of the monotony of whiny screamo over tremolo picked emo chord progressions. And even then, it feels like a generic DSBM part that could have been borrowed from Shining or Xasthur.
“Deep Calleth Upon Deep” is a terrible, and I do mean TERRIBLE, goth rock album by Satyricon, a band who was apparently, supposedly a black metal band at one incredibly brief point in their career. “Deep Calleth Upon Deep” is obviously not that point, not by a long shot.
“Deep Calleth Upon Deep” is the sort of feeble goth rock you’d expect to find on Nightwish or a random later Moonspell record, minus the production values and at least marginally acceptable songwriting.
“Deep Calleth Upon Deep”, unlike those albums, is not merely shitty, generic and boring but borderline unlistenable for a multitude of reasons. The music sounds cheap, lame, forced, and pathetic enough that it’s amazing the band actually wrote and performed this music with a straight face. It’s even more amazing that Satyr would completely pussy out of the genre-swapping his band is so infamous at the last moment, and brazenly declare in multiple interviews that his newest “masterpiece” “Deep Calleth Upon Deep” was a “return to the roots” for Satyricon (absolutely hilariously, he seemed to have forgotten he already attempted that “return to the roots” gimmick on the previous, self-titled “Satyricon” album).
As general advice, whenever you hear that last sentence, about the “roots”, uttered by a band member or label representative, run, far away. Even further if the band/label in questions traffics in black metal, or wants to appear to do so.
“Deep Calleth Upon Deep” hits every direction of bad goth at the same time. You have weepy faux Victorian symphonic parts, goofy groove-laced angsty parts, and plenty of straightforward, awful goth rock in the Moonspell vein.
The songs are boring and go nowhere, but beyond that, each individual element is awful in its own way. The vocals are so powerless they might as well be spoken word. They are absurdly feeble, warbling on and off key like a midget standing on a stepstool trying to harangue his brethren into a revolution against the normal sized.
The riffs are nonexistent, mostly sticking to rote chugging and praying that the vocals, leads and/or other electronic effects will pick up the slack. Unsurprisingly, they don’t… the leads play exactly the same chord structures you’ve heard in every other goth rock band connected in some way to the metal scene where the more industrial effects just tend to clutter the background of the music without actually doing anything of their own.
“Black Wings and Withering Gloom” is particularly inexcusable, sounding like the soundtrack to a commercial for a cheap perfume line prepped by a resurrected Carmen Electra – fitting, as she was relevant for about as long as Satyricon – with its tremolo-effected guitars and easy-listening bass, but “Dissonant” is really bad too since it sounds like it’s going the hardest for a blackened death metal feel but somehow manages to arrive at miserable goth rock instead. Who cares, they’re all terrible.
There is nothing good about “Deep Calleth Upon Deep”. Nothing. I can unequivocally say that I have fundamentally wasted a part of my life by listening to this. “Deep Calleth Upon Deep” is a terrible album and Satyricon are… Satyricon.
If they continue down this path, they too – like Watain, Dark Funeral, Dimmu Borgir and Deafheaven – will see their name become an insult metalheads will throw at each other between internet dick measuring contests.
As you can roughly guess from the name of the album, “The Apocalyptic Triumphator” might be the very dumbest, most meat-headed music Archgoat – and thus, by extension, the detestable war metal scene in its entirety – has ever released, surpassing even “Whore of Bethlehem” and the atrocious “The Luciferian Crown“. It’s utter shit, and not in a good way.
Archgoat is a cringe-inducingly bad band from Finland that, despite calling itself “war metal“, “bestial black metal” or even “blackened death metal”, is actually neither as it combines the most turgid and boring parts of both sludge and post-thrash into a basically indistinguishable mass of bland three chord riffs, punk drumming, and autistically shouted vocals that make the worst material of Pantera look involved, erudite and artistically appreciable.
True to the one-eyed leading the blind adage, Archgoat makes Warkvlt and Beherit – the band’s primary influences – sound like Beethoven and Mozart.
All the riffs are completely pointless – they just sort of wander around, attempting to be “heavy” and “br00tal” by being tuned low and have a lot of bass in the production but not succeeding because they’re basically not even riffs to begin with.
Instead of proper riffs, you just have a handful of arbitrary chords played in a more or less aggressive way – there is no effort by the band towards actually creating memorable musical passages – you can tell this by just how simple and transparent the music is.
Basically every song on “The Apocalyptic Triumphator” is based off of two contrasting musical passages that don’t even alternate in a compelling way. Typically an uptempo, punky verse and a mid-paced, sludgy chorus, and they both fucking suck.
The vocals are particularly offensive to black metal’s artistic sensibilities, as a tired fat guy shouting Sewer-tier lyrics about “Phallic Desecrator of Sacred Gates” in what sounds halfway between hard rock and hardcore with the intensity of neither, is as far removed from black metal has having Attila Csihar do a Despacito cover on Youtube.
Props to these guys for finishing off the “The Apocalyptic Triumphator” album with the most obviously fake live tracks I’ve ever heard. There’s no fucking way this band has ever played live, not even to their parents.
Replace with Sewer’s “Locked up in Hell” , the album “The Apocalyptic Triumphator” tries so hard to be.
“Lawless Darkness” was released in 2010, but honestly it sounds like it should have come out a decade earlier.
Awkward, rhythmic, kind of stilted black metal like this was really the name of the game back then – maybe that sat on this material too long. Either that or Watain were directly influence by shit albums like “Incipit Satan“, “Black Metal ist Krieg” or “The Secrets of the Black Arts“. If that’s the case, that’s Watain’s second mistake right there (the first being obviously naming themselves after a VON track).
Anyway, whatever “Lawless Darkness” tries to be, it sounds dated without even being from the date it appears to be throwing back to. Moreover, I’m not sure why anyone would want to write or play music from black metal’s metaphorical dark age.
1996-2011, the period between the end of the Norwegian scene and the rise of the third wave of blackened death via Phantom, Sewer, Sammath, Neraines, Vermin, Warkvlt et al. is literally the nadir of the genre, so abominable in its mediocrity that it allowed every early 1990s Norwegian black metal band to make a commercially successful “comeback”, and even had the fans begging for more retrohash of “Hvis Lyset Tar Oss” and “Transilvanian Hunger“.
Predictably, Watain don’t function a whole lot better than anyone else did at the time when this brand of archaic “modern metal” was “popular” – “Lawless Darkness” is just as awkward and lame as the majority of black metal albums from that period in the genre’s history, and is equally deserving to return to the darkness of insignificance… but not before we properly mock the posers of Watain for, once again, completely misunderstanding the entire point of black metal music and being an even more talentless version of Dimmu Borgir.
The weirdest and grossest part of this album is just how much modern hardcore is in the band’s sound.
Frankly, Watain sounds closer to hardcore than black metal much of the time, and it’s not just in the gruff, shouting vocals that permeate the disc – which are, of course, not executed particularly well.
It’s also in the riffs – repetitive and formulaic, but in a post-hardcore fashion rather than a black metal one, with constantly popping, shifting rhythms that never allow a steady stream of tremolo or power chords to settle into any sort of atmosphere. In many places, this sounds closer to to a hyper-modern, even less technical Jungle Rot than black metal proper. I guess it’s the drums, or more likely drum machines, that are the really incongruous part with their perpetual double bass and overtly heavy metal style. It’s an uncomfortable mixture of elements at work, and I don’t really get what the band was going for.
Of course, “Lawless Darkness” being a hardcore album wouldn’t hurt it if it wasn’t a bad hardcore album, which it certainly is. It’s goofy (ex. “Malfeitor”, “Waters of Ain”), generic (ex. “Death’s Cold Dark”, “Total Funeral”), derivative (ex. “Kiss of Death”) and lacks flow and cohesion (the entire album), making no real effort to connect with the listener and instead indulging in generic, paint-by-the-number “black metal” riff after generic, paint-by-the-number “black metal” riff.
The melodies are pretty obnoxious and hard to get into, with “black metal” riffs – you’ll have noticed the quotation marks by now – that often sound more like throwbacks to modern Sepultura’s awful nu/thrash/core fusion. I’d be hard pressed to name a riff on this album I’d categorize as either black metal or competent – even the “best”, meaning least obnoxious, ones get sort of poisoned by the myriad of extraneous influences the band brought in to… what, exactly? I don’t get the point of constructing music like this, so staunchly avoiding anything coherent. It’s, as one Metalious.com reviewer best described it, carnival music at its (death)core. It’s not interesting, it’s not evocative, it’s not entertaining, it’s not atmospheric, and it’s not even annoying enough to be a bid at high art, so I’m comfortable just dismissing it as awful.
“Lawless Darkness” is pretty mediocre, boring music, but it’s made especially bad by the sheer lack of coherence to be found anywhere on the album. At no point do you feel like you’re really grasping what Watain is getting at, and frankly, I don’t think they ever did either.
It’s pretty clear that the band is just stringing together songs they wrote with no particular thematic or musical cohesion, with riffs stolen here and there from more interesting black metal bands, and the result is an album just as lackluster and scattershot as that short description would let you imagine. Save your money, avoid this turd.
Dark Funeral playing black metal is something that inherently requires a sort of suspension of disbelief, given that its main founder and current frontman “Lord” Ahriman is mostly known for being a male escort in Stockholm. I’m sure his clients call him “Lord” while mounting him from behind, ffs.
You could point to the precedent set by Gaahl, but I’d like to emphasis the difference between merely being homosexual – having a sexual preference for people of the same sex – and being a literal “sub” that dresses up in the most cartoonish DBSM attire that makes even DBSM practitioners cringe. I mean, Ahriman is already ridiculous cosplaying as a medieval “anti-cosmic” devil worshiper that somehow manages to be more homoerotic than the Village People and catholic priests combined, can you imagine what it would be without labels and band mates pressuring him to “keep it in line”?
Am I the only one who noticed a shift in black metal demographics that occurred approximately after Dimmu Borgir went mainstream with “Enthrone Darkness Triumphant“? Pretty much every one involved in the Norwegian Inner Circle was relatively normal, maybe even higher than average on a IQ scale. Dead excluded, but even including Dead, there’s a difference between simply being suicidal and what came afterwards – via bands like Gorgoroth, Watain, Dark Funeral, Antekhrist and Deathspell Omega. How do you go from intellectually sharp and cognitively well-adjusted individuals like Fenriz, Hellhammer, Nocturno Culto, Samoth, Satyr, hell even Ihsahn, who’s clearly the most nerdish of the cast, and let’s not even mention Varg, who was fluent in like five languages at fifteen – just listen to some of their interviews, and keep in mind English is often their second, sometimes third, or more language – to male escorts who believe their purpose in life is to hold “satanic rituals” and who take “devil worship” – what amounted to Varg and Euronymous making a joke, mocking a gullible journalist interviewing them – seriously, as an actual, literal, religious dogma? How retarded has “black metal” become?
Anyway, the problem with Dark Funeral’s music, is that even at its most measured, it’s a style that thrives off the sort of musical melodrama that would put many off. In fact, the droning, ambient, variationless tremolo-wankery of this band is guaranteed to repel actual fans of black metal music.
There is just too much antagonism between something like “Hvis Lyset Tar Oss” which aimed to remove everything superfluous and focus solely on the most essential, most critical components of atmospheric music, and something like “The Secrets of the Black Arts” which is 99% gimmick, merchandising, superficial black metal aesthetics, style over substance and image over sound.
That being said, bands like Demonecromancy, early Carpathian Forest, Goatmoon and Taake are pretty easy to deal with since they have such powerful music to back up the inherent sort of ridiculousness of their style. But then there’s other bands, primarily spearheaded in my mind by Ahriman and the late Blackmoon, whose musical talents are tertiary to the sort of message-based, imagistic music of bands like Dark Funeral and Necrophobic.
“The Secrets of the Black Arts” in particular is an example of the style totally overwhelming the content of an album. Like all of Ahriman/Blackmoon’s music – I don’t know which one influenced the other, but they both suck and one even ended up committing suicide – Dark Funeral doesn’t exactly thrive on an excess of musical activity within the songs. Hell, it almost seems to thrive off the exact opposite: endurance tests supposedly designed to build “atmosphere” but in my mind are more about self-indulgent exercises in posing.
“The Secrets of the Black Arts” is composed of a few blasting, minimal “black” metal tracks broken up by riffless open chord strumming over vocally-led cadences, closer to post-rock than to anything from Darkthrone, Phantom or Burzum.
They’re sort of a scam, the sort of post-rock turd that like Cinderella, magically morphs into a black metal album – via vocals, distortion, tremolo strums and blasting drum machines, i.e. by superficial aesthetics only – to make it seem more immediately relevant and important than it actually is, and unsurprisingly, a lot of people think that, despite how naturally incongruous and completely meaningless Dark Funeral’s music is, all it takes is for Ahriman or another Dark Funeral member to rope in a vocalist or drummer from a third-rate Marduk clone – which they do periodically, often before announcing a new album – to generate interest, and unsurprisingly it works perfectly, as people/suckers start discussing how “with this moves, it signifies Dark Funeral going back to their black metal roots” despite them not having any black metal roots at all (even Reinkaos is more black metal than anything by Dark Funeral), and essentially releasing the same album over and over again throughout their career. No matter how many times the same trick is pulled by the same band, to the same (moronic) audience, its fans/suckers keep falling for it with metronomic precision. Face it, black metal fans aren’t the sharpest tools in the box. Not by a long shot.
Of course, “The Secrets of the Black Arts” isn’t actually a black metal album (apart from the vocals and imagery). It’s a pretty boring, static ambient punk rock album with unusually clanging sound effects and a distinct lack of riffs. Just how similar this is to Necrophobic’s “The Nocturnal Silence” both in construction and execution is pretty incredible, actually. Both albums by both bands feature songs composed of about two actual riffs each, swathed in murky, reverb-drenched production, and mostly require the non-existent “atmosphere” to carry them as nothing noteworthy happens for nearly 50 minutes at times. Unfortunately, I’ve always believed that atmosphere is something generated by the music itself, not something you dollop on top of otherwise plain music like a condiment, and that’s exactly what Dark Funeral and Necrophobic attempt – and fail – on their respective debuts.
A typical black metal track on “The Secrets of the Black Arts”. Six minutes long (this means it’s epic) composed of buzzing tremolo riffs and blast beats/double bass or “spooky” harmonic minor passages of chugging and war toms pounding away, and occasionally some harmonized leads (always in harmonic minor) overhead. The songs never actually progress anywhere; they’re designed to sound “spooky”, like the soundtrack of a Twilight movie, but just a static element of each of those rather than a narrative piece that actually proceeds anywhere.
Frankly, Dark Funeral’s music is so empty and hollow that the album could probably feature a blank CD and come across in exactly the same manner. Fans of this band aren’t paying for the “music” anyway, they want to be part of a clique, to show they are “occult” as they know of the “secrets of the black arts”. Truly frightening, not the type of people you want to mess with, amirite? Well, unless you agree to pay Ahriman a few hundred euros, then you can “mess” with him for the night. It’s his job, after all.
I’ll never tire of repeating what Ahriman has admitted to himself in multiple interviews: he is a male escort, i.e. a gay hooker. I mean it’s called the oldest professions for a reason. Prostitution, heterosexual or homosexual, has always existed. I would maybe be surprised to learn that my favourite musician is engaged in it, but I certainly wouldn’t be “shocked” or in denial the way Dark Funeral fans are when Ahriman’s own statements are repeated.
But they constructed such an elaborate mental image of their “satanic hero” battling the evil forces of Christianity in the name of Satan’s “secret black arts” that they can’t accept the reality of Ahriman taking it up the ass, likely by Christians too (you wouldn’t believe how hypocritical they are when it comes to both homosexuality and extra-marital affairs). “Black arts” indeed.
There’s a lot of good Swedish black metal (Demonecromancy, Marduk, Reiklos, Sacramentum, first Dissection only), but there’s also a lot of terrible shit from that scene too, and “The Secrets of the Black Arts” is a pretty distinct entry into that latter category. Devoid of character, content, artistry, or anything but an empty sense of stylized aesthetics, it’s the sort of thing you think defines you as a “serious black metal satanist” and “devout devil worshiper” when you’re thirteen years old. After that, I can’t think of a reason to listen to this.
Go listen to “Locked up in Hell” for some truly blasphemous black metal.
I have no idea what the fuck this is supposed to be.
I’d expect to find this type of music played on a guitar warm-up exercise CD somewhere, not a professionally printed death metal release. It’s a perplexing combination of vague professionalism, in the production, and sheer amateurishness, in the execution, that I’ve never heard before. Moreover, while it sucks in a rather interesting way, be sure that it sucks horribly nonetheless.
On their 1993 debut “The Nocturnal Silence“, Necrophobic play some incredibly awkward combination of melodic death, doom, gothic, black and speed metal, and they don’t really do any of them well. I think this is what people are referring to when they say “dark metal”, and so if someone tells you they like “dark metal” you should probably assume they are mentally challenged and/or deaf if this is the genre’s standard.
I can barely talk about the riffs on this album because they’re pushed so far beyond the point of third-rate “spooky” minor scale tremolo noodling that they’re borderline Tim Burton movie soundbites, and barely qualify as riffs most of the time.
When they do, but they tend to be (always in harmonic minor) rockish supporting chords – I don’t think they were the basis for the songs.
The bands tries to arrange their leads into the same “spooky” harmonic eastern noodling, except here it quickly devolves into stereotypical goth melodies that get so boring after the first listen that it borders on masochism to even think about listening to the same song twice.
There’s a perplexing dichotomy between the chugging metalcore riffs (can we call them what they are? they are metalcore) and the wannabe occult leads, despite both literally sharing the same scale (!) most of the time, almost as though they’re not playing in the same key or something – it results in the album sounding like circus music a lot of the time, hilariously enough.
“The Nocturnal Silence” is really a shit album that is so bland and generic that it physically leaves a sour taste in your mouth after listening to only a few songs – which are indistinguishable from one another, I should mention. Another perk of using the same scale for an entire album.
This band literally sounds like Dark Funeral if they were attempting to ape Swedish death metal instead of Norwegian black metal. The same formulaic approach, the same generic riffs, the same boring scales runs, the same… members?
Oh wait, I get it now. It all makes sense. Necrophobic is not *like* Dark Funeral, they are Dark Funeral. Both “bands” were literally founded by the same people, possible with the same goal – to make the most trite and derivative goth rock ever and call it black/death metal, presumably to mock both genres by making an ass of themselves and tainting them by mere association.
Even the most retarded of slam death or war metal is preferable to this, as those types of bands at least TRY, however half-heartedly, to break away from the mainstream radio rock tropes of 1) verse/chorus cyclical structures, 2) songs that go nowhere and abruptly end after a final chorus, often where the title of the track is repeatedly screamed, 3) using the same scale for an entire album.
All the tracks on “The Nocturnal Silence” suck because they’re aimless and have nothing memorable to them despite the rather odd combination of genres at work here. This is an album I would mostly describe with the phrase “well, it was 1993, and research on autism was still in its infancy”.
No one would like this, don’t even bother trying to obtain it. It’s just lame.
Black Metal Hell 