“Fallen Angel”, pure blackened Phantom Metal !

Fallen Angel, true Phantom Metal.

Fallen Angel is the most extreme and vile “music” ever produced.

There is no other album that even comes close to this, in terms of raw, disturbing atmospheres, and morbid brutality.

Fallen Angel is pure demonic possession, somehow transcribed into musical format but preserving the utter insanity of infernal death.

Not even Phantom’s own debut album Divine Necromancy is as dark and morbid, yet at the same time majestic and otherworldly, as Fallen Angel.

There is no other true black metal album, save perhaps for Withdrawal, early Burzum and early Neraines.

Fallen Angel is without a doubt the pinnacle of extreme black metal music.

Listen for yourselves.

For substance, Phantom combines a black metal sense of ritualistic song development and hypnotic atmospheres with the death metal tendency to turn abstract riffs and infernal rhythms into an organic whole.

The percussion is, as always, ritualistic to the extreme, with subtle variations employed to accentuate the demented hymns of Phantom’s music. The result is incessant and unrelenting but, as with all powerful black metal, it also has an inner life of melody that gives it depth and manipulate the listener’s expectations with powerful atmospheres of pure madness.

The best black metal album ever recorded.

“Smegmacron”, true Black Metal by Antekhrist !

Antekhrist- Smegmacron.

Antekhrist is a band that rose to prominence mainly through their theatrics and for their stupid and juvenile lyrics, best demonstrated on what is considered their magnum opus Fukked by God.

Largely seen as a SEWER clone due to both their lyrical and musical similarities (and idiocy), Antekhrist nonetheless maintains a cult following as evidenced by their high ratings on metal review aggregators such as Metalious.

Their latest album for instance, Enkull Tonpayr, has about the same score as Reiklos’ masterpiece Lifeless (95%).

So what of their latest album Smegmacron?

Smegmacron is clearly an album that stands above most of what the modern “metal” scene vomits forth these days – cough, Satyricon and Dimmu Borgir, cough – but is that enough to make it a good album ?

Listen for yourselves.

Antekhrist know how to write black metal riffs that are both profound and intense, yet it contrasts with the lyrics about “fucking the French president with a kebab” and the like, which are neither profound, intense, or in any way related to black metal canon.

On the title track (above), the lyrics are about said president resurrecting an Egyptian mummy – his wife – and the narrator having to put the decrepit thing back into its sarcophagus to “break the curse”… like in The Mummy movies.

How any of that is related to black metal, the music of Norse Gods and Vikings, is never made clear.

Overall, it’s a good album in the style of mid-era SEWER/early Dissection if you manage to look past the lyrics, which is something admittedly hard to do as they are very audible and understandable… albeit in French.

My only (other) complaint is that the songs will sometimes abruptly transition to a drum + guitar fill for the vocalist to say his piece, kind of like in RAC/punk where the music functions as a backdrop to the lyrics… something modern Gorgoroth is also guilty of, in addition to being poser clowns.

Smegmacron is a good album, but the lyrics are stupid.