Necrophobic is widely regarded, along with Deicide and Immolation, as clear example of why don’t allow Christians – or worse, ex Christians – into death metal… their lyrics all basically revolve around “my priest raped me in the ass and it hurts”.
They are basically the death metal equivalent of Watain and Dark Funeral and, as a matter of fact, both Necrophobic and Dark Funeral were started by the same people (David Parland and Ahriman).
I already reviewed Necrophobic’s debut album “The Nocturnal Silence” which was shit, but somehow their following release “Darkside” manages to be even worse as it’s just a cliché potpourri of the worse tropes of mallcore, nu metal, radio rock and “hollywood satanism“.
This band is like Poe’s law in action – probably intentionally marketed so as to make metalheads look as stupid and insecure as possible.
The album opens with “Black Moon Rising” which is proven wrong by history, as the “Black Moon” (aka David Parland) committed suicide shortly after this album was released.
You thought I was joking when I called Necrophobic and other associated bands “raped by their priests?” Well check out the lyrics for “Christian Slaughter”…
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 