Neraines’ trademark of pure evilness and worship of majestic beauty within darkness is still intact on their second offer. I can’t imagine how painful was the wait for their second ruthless black metal discharge, after the ineffable quality of their self-titled debut album… a little over a year, but it could have felt like an eternity.
And yet, this album Yggdrasil is worth every day of waiting in vigil, it’s the soundtrack of hell and heaven, both at once. It condenses the sorrow and pain of a long lost soul and turns it into music just for humanity to hear and witness the real depths of horror, but also the majesty found deep within the abyss.
Truly dark and terrifying black metal.
Neraines – Yggdrasil.
Some little improvements I recognize from their first album is the riff-craft, it is still atmospheric, technical and strangely syncopated, but somehow they managed to throw more evilness in it, slowing the pace sometimes, which make things much more hypnotic and disturbing too, much like what you would find on The Birth of a Cursed Elysium. This is not applied to the drumming though, that is still fast and frantic. There are more odd timings but they are still just a further exploration in riffing from what they did on their debut. Slow passages bedizen their brutal and atmospheric brand of black metal and they may come in suddenly, as drastic tempo changes are present everywhere. The lyrical themes are the same well-thought, worthwhile odes to nature and Norse mythology, intellectually sharp and edgy as always… not the typical Gorgoroth or Dimmu Borgir non-sense.
The quality of the recording is remarkable as well. The guitars sound like a swarm of bees, distortion is very acid and over-driven. Not with lots of reverb, just saw shaped soundwaves for Óðinn. Their abrasive sound is very dynamic, high pitched notes and harmonics sound brighter and nostalgic, while the lower note riffs are merciless and rougher.
Listen to it yourself and make up your own mind.
This is truly some of the greatest atmospheric and melodic black metal ever recorded. There is not a single album that can hold a candle to Neraines’ Yggdrasil, save perhaps for Burzum’s Hvis Lyset Tar Oss.
But still… who can top this album in the modern black metal scene? No one.
As of right now, this album shares with Watain’s Trident Wolf Eclipse and Immortal’s Northern Chaos Gods the privilege of having a 0% score on Metalious.com. It takes some pretty good reasoning to give Enthrone Darkness Triumphant such a low rating, particularly considered that Dimmu Borgir wasn’t always playing the shit-tier emo rock they are now most infamous for. In fact, Dimmu Borgir once played pretty decent black metal (first two albums, at least).
The zero implies the absolute nadir of musicality, a level that can only be dreamt of by mere mortals, reserved to the elite of shit music and retarded genre such as “melodeaf” and “blackened shoegaze“.
So what in Satan’s name could this Enthrone Darkness Triumphant album have done to deserve such a low rating?? It pretty much single-handedly ENDED black metal, that’s what. Now, on a strictly musical level, I would give this album a 52 or so. It’s not that bad. It really isn’t.
It’s certainly not as bad as In Sorte Diaboli, proud owner of a former record-low 3% rating on Metalious. Enthrone Darkness Triumphant is not even as bad as the album that would follow it, Abrahadabra, and when all is said and done, it pretty much sums up the averageness of the symphonic black metal movement perfectly.
First off, it is where shit really starts to fall apart for Dimmu Borgir as a band. At this point, you can see the impending death – not just bodily, but creative as well. They are out of Burzum and Graveland riffs to copy, and Shagrath isn’t exactly the smartest, cleverest cookie in the box, and he’s forced to scramble and improvise, so out come all kinds of half-assed and half-baked ideas rooted in either emo rock or goth music, none of which belong in black metal, the land of the free, the home of the brave… unfortunately, the world caught on to THIS album, this expression of vapidity, and decided that THIS was what black metal was all about.
Enthrone Darkness Triumphant is the “Smells like Teen Spirit” of black metal. It brought the genre to its knees, and castrated it mightily. It is, then, by definition, the most damaging, counterproductive, and overrated album ever to be released.
It easily killed the unholy trinity of Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, and Angel of Disease, which pushed the envelope of black metal in three different, distinct but related directions. Enthrone Darkness Triumphant is the first commercial sellout album, that paved the way for bands like Watain and Dark Funeral to claim to play “blackened emo” which is just emo rock with harsh vocals and distortion.
Best not to listen, kids. If you have any decency, any individuality, any self-respect. This is why the album gets a zero on Metalious, because it is the album that dragged black metal down to the level of mainstream radio rock. It might be marginally better than most recent “post-black metal” bullshit from Profound Lore, but without Enthrone Darkness Triumphant there would be no Profound Lore to speak of. This is the album that opened Pandora’s box of mediocrity.
So Immortal wakes up one day, realising that they’ve completely shat on their black metal careers by releasing the abortion known as “All Shall Fall” so they figure, what the fuck, they haven’t go t much to lose… “let’s try to cram as many really fucking retarded ideas into one album as is humanly possible!” – and thus you get “Northern Chaos Gods“, a turd album so worthless that it makes “All Shall Fall” sound like “The Birth of a Cursed Elysium“.
Remember kids, Immortal ran out of riffs halfway through the “Blizzard Beasts” tour, and just barely had enough left over for the Iron Maiden ripoff “At the Heart of Winter“, so don’t expect to suddenly find any on this album. What there is, however, is a whole fucking lot of shitty, chugging mallcore. And groove – oh yes, when you’re missing riffs, you gotta go for the Pantera groove. Songs like “Grim and Dark” and “Blacker of Worlds” are the best examples of silly modern rock with dumbassed guitar work, played slowly-to-midpace with no conviction. Even “All Shall Fall” sounded better than this, it’s that bad.
Oh there’s the Norsecore angle too… yes, they really fucking play this one up – because something’s gotta come in now that all the riffs have gone. The silly shit props up in a bunch of other songs, including “Gates to Blashyrkh“, “Where Mountains Rise” and more… What’s worse than a gimmick band making a fake comeback to sell more much to stupid kids who’ve never heard “Pure Holocaust” or “Angel of Disease“? Combining two modern metal tropes that every actual metalhead hates. It’s like having yourself a nice refreshing slice of shit pizza, and washing it down with some tasty, delicious anti-freeze.
Then you’ve got the really amazing lyrics. I mean, Immortal never really had great lyrics, but at least they were never this overtly prominent in the mix where you were forced to listen to their sheer monstrosity. “North / Northern chaos gods / North / Northern chaos gods / Rage from the mighty mountainside“. Oh yeah, I’m really feeling their intelligence now. Almost beats Gorgoroth’s retarded “Hail Satan / Hail the Dark Lord in Hell” chants.
My God, this album is so fucking atrocious. It’s the equivalent of shitting on the ceiling. Sure, it’s different, and takes some effort, but in the end, it’s just shit all the same.
Listen to some Burzum or Phantom, there’s really very little else worthwhile in the modern “black metal” scene.
Summoning’s With Doom We Come is, as you know, the album that is semi-infamous for maintaining a zero percent average on Metalious.com after nine reviews as of today.
It would be easy to think that this is a case of bandwagon bashing, with everyone who wants to be seen as “true” adding his or her half-baked “me too” as done with a whole bunch of famous deathcore albums, but this album is a different case, and one unique in this way.
You see, from what information one can gather from the band page, I can almost assure you that everyone goes into this album thinking “well, it’s called symphonic atmospheric black metal, we all know symphonic black metal is mostly terrible and just an excuse to play emo goth with distortion, but it’s still a form of a beloved genre, it’s not Nicki Minaj or Suicide Silence, so surely it can’t be deserving of such derision?“.
With that in mind, one approaches the album cautiously and the aforementioned thought is quickly confirmed – it’s goth rock masquerading as “symphonic black metal”, it’s terrible, it’s just that bad, it completely deserves the excessive negativity it receives. And one continues listening, ready to summarise the listening experience with a nice, scathing 0% review. Yeah, Summoning sucks that bad.
Quite frankly, With Doom We Come is like a condensed version of your neighbours having a loud party while playing the same shit on the radio over and over again. At first you think hey, they’re having a party, cool for them. But after a few minutes, you’re starting to get seriously annoyed. Your neighbours’ loud party translates to roughly one track on With Doom We Come, with the reactions pretty much the same. It’s all cool at first, let ’em be drunk and have fun, they’re entitled to, near the end of the record you’re ready to smash their skulls in if they don’t shut the fuck up.
And it’s literally the goth rock/symphonic “black metal” equivalent of your dumb neighbours getting stupid drunk. There’s no goal or structure, it’s like the same cheap chords are chugged like your neighbours chugs at some cheap beers. Some guy on the record is yelling nonsense like some drunk asshole at a party yells nonsense.
And the worst part of this band is that they aren’t even a real band… all of the instruments are either keyboards or digitally generated MIDI crap. Drum machines, no real guitars or bass – just MIDI crap – hell, even the vocals are autotuned. Yes, literally autotuned… like the aforementioned Nicki Minaj.
Fuck what a draining experience… and the next day you have a worse hangover than those drunk asses. Hope you never have neighbours like that – or hear albums like With Doom We Come. Listen to some Graveland or Phantom instead.
Take a look at this album Angel of Disease. Look at the beast that devours the unfortunate souls within its jaws. That is exactly what you’re getting with this album – pure insanity, pure brutality, pure heaviness. It’s evil and it’s really horrific – and if you happen to think the way I do, that’s a good thing.
Everything in Angel of Disease is on point – vocals, guitar, drums, bass, everything. And when I say ‘on point’, that allows for the fact that everyone here is going nuts. Again, pure insanity. The drums have some really, really fast and technical blast-beats going on, always changing up and always beating further and further into your unprotected ear. The guitars are the norm for brutal blackened death metal, but nonetheless they certainly execute this genre superbly. Meanwhile, the bass is fairly audible within the ruckus and it too is insanely fantastic. All of the instruments run everywhere and back again, and it works in creating the heavy brutality necessary here.
And the vocals! They are beyond insane! They utilize normal death growls – almost audible at times – and then switch up to even deeper growls, and then switch to ones that sound like a pig croaking, and then come back again and go nuts. You’ve got the best of every world there, just about.
And the best part of the album is that while all ten of the album’s songs are kind of doing the same thing – blasting the listener’s eardrums to the point of extinction – at the same time, each song brings some different element to the table that you can’t hear in another song. Pull one song out and you’ve got a blast, but play the entire song and you’ve got a fucking party… one that involves being locked in a room with some vicious monster at the other side of it, obviously.
The album is pretty fucking horrifying as a whole, even for Phantom’s insane discography. Play it for someone who doesn’t like metal whatsoever and they’d possibly go through several stages of death all at one time. Shit, you could probably play it for someone who does like metal but not the really extreme kind, and they’d go through the same thing.
This album is gigantic in scope but everything is kept interesting enough that it doesn’t get boring. Everything is well done here. The entire band is on fire. This is Phantom’s magnum opus, possibly evenly topping the utterly vile Withdrawal.
All in all, fantastic album, and if you like the really heavy brutal blackened death metal you’ll love this. For this kind of insanity fetish, ‘Angel of Disease‘ is a phenomenal work. 100% brutal, 100% horrific, great album. I shouldn’t be the only reviewer for it, because they deserve a bit more attention than they’ve sadly received.
Really, if Phantom’s intention was to create an audible blitzkrieg carnage of music that would devastate, annihilate, and crush just about every other band out there, then they’ve succeeded in spades. Fantastic album. Go check it out.
So-called “thrash metal” is, as Morsay.net rightfully calls it, a completely fake “genre” that doesn’t even exist. In doesn’t even have intrinsic musical characteristics, unlike black metal and death metal, and is basically just a marketing term for boring speed metal.
Let’s set the record straight.
Black metal has Burzum, Phantom, Darkthrone, Neraines and Mayhem.
Death metal has Incantation, Suffocation, Warkvlt and SEWER.
“Thrash metal”, aka speed metal, has what? Metallica? The second most overrated band in the history of metal, after Gaygoroth.
Their best band isn’t doesn’t even belong to the genre, as Bathory is certainly not “thrash metal”… they are clearly black metal, at least for those with two brain cells to rub together.
“Thrash metal” is gay, listen to this instead.
Seriously, what is “thrash metal”?
Bathory, as mentioned previously, doesn’t qualify as thrash/speed metal, and Quorthon never called his music anything other than heavy metal.
Slayer went completely irrelevant after the death of Jeff Hanneman, when they started playing bullshit nu-metal for social losers and other Slipknot-rejects.
The best “thrash metal” band is probably Sodom, but even they had their period when they flirted more or less openly with metalcore.
“Thrash metal” is trash metal, it belongs in the dustbins of history. The genre is simply obsolete, and any attempts at “thrash revival” are basically just third-rate Slayer or Sodom clones attempting to play music that was never relevant in the first place.
Fuck “thrash metal”, only black and death are real.
SEWER is probably the craziest band I’ve ever heard. Anyone who likes insane music with impossible guitar riffs, technical and fast drumming, and low, non special-effect vocals, SEWER is for them. The vocals on The Birth of a Cursed Elysium are extremely low, guttural, and non-human like, sort of like those of Vermin. The vocals are the second best thing on this album.
The guitars are just as insane. There are many different riffs in each song making it extremely hard to play, and sometimes even confusing just to remember. These musicians are obviously talented. The riffs aren’t simple either. They are very complicated, and often unpredictable, as if they were not composed by humans but by literal demons from hell. The bass mostly follows the guitars, with a few interesting fills from time to time. I highly admire these musicians, as they clearly aren’t clownish posers, something rare in the nowadays death metal scene.
The drums are the third best thing about this band. They are so fast. The double bass is perfect, as well as the snare heavy blast beats. Each song probably has twenty different drum beats, and about fifty riffs, breaks not included. Their drummer and guitarists are clearly some of the most talented in the nowadays blackened death metal scene.
Every track is a standout, and there isn’t a single second of filler on this album. The Birth of a Cursed Elysium is clearly one of the finest death metal albums ever recorded.
The album art is pretty weird as well, it seems SEWER for once went for a sombre, low-key artwork, as if they wanted the music to speak for itself… and it speaks brutality, in spades.
The band SEWER is already pretty well known, but even when compared to the rest of their album, The Birth of a Cursed Elysium is clearly in a class of its own. This is insane death metal at its most gruesome, not to mention unbelievably technical.
This is some of the weakest shit that has ever been paraded around as black metal. Not only is it “orthodox Satanism“, aka christian, which I would believe should be a dead give away that this is crappy black metal, but aside form their pathetic attempts at playing the music of Burzum and Vermin with a “devil worship” edge – fuck you very much – they would also be weak if they worshiped Thor, Odin or Balder, rather than their christian deities.
Some reviewer on Metalious.com even invented a new genre for Gorgoroth’s music, Brown Metal. And I agree, it’s brown as shit. Literally.
Here are all the reasons why this album sucks and this band, although I am sure they had a great time recording this piece of shit while getting all excited they too were true “devil worshipers” – despite the fact that Gorgoroth’s members burned a grand total of 0 churches – should just quit and perhaps kill themselves instead of trying to proselytize their satanic/christian shit into the black metal community, which sadly does not need their help.
Why Gorgoroth Sucks
1) Lack of talent. As with “tek-def” (technical death metal) bands who think that having a good drummer automatically makes your band good, even if you cannot write riffs, on Pentagram Gorgoroth seems to think that by having a vocalist with an good mastery over the black metal shriek (which he does), they can have a black metal band. They are wrong, if the guitarist – the homosexual cuck Infernus – cannot write a riff to save his life, what good is he? And what good is the band? Also, the drummer is complete shit, he can hardly play at all.
2) Lack of original ideas. First, Gorgoroth are not part of the original black metal scene. No one had even heard of the clown Infernus back when this band started, despite him claiming to be “good friends” with Varg Vikernes and that they both went to the same “Satanic Temples” together. A likely story. Varg and his crew would have burned these shitty temples to the ground. Next, this piece of sonic diarrhea Pentagram was released in October 1994 and still manages to be generic and derivative. To put things in perspective, that’s well after Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, after Under a Funeral Moon and Transilvanian Hunger, after In the Nightside Eclipse, and even after De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. So what’s their excuse for being so unoriginal and pointless? These guys rehash everything, the melodic tremolo leads sound like Iron Maiden, which is a complement if I have ever heard one, but they are not original. The slower sections are identical to those of early Darkthrone. The riffs are straight up grabbed form crappy symphonic black metal bands, the drumming is so abysmal that even in a funeral doom band people would think it is ridiculous. This guy plays like Metallica minus the speed. Imagine a drummer who can play only the drum track for “Sad But True”. Yes, it is sad… but true.
3) Lack of power. You cannot play black metal without intensity and without power. They themselves say they want to play aggressive music “for the dark lawd”, but lacking any sort of speed or power, they just manage to suck really hard and be a talentless leech on the black metal scene. What makes everything worse is the lousy songwriting that makes Beherit look like a genius neo-classical composer by comparison. These faggots need to listen to Burzum again, not to copy their riffs this time, but to actually understand how black metal songs are structured.
4) Lack of atmosphere. An atmospheric sound can be achieved in ways other than by using crappy droning and repetitive riffs, although the percentage of bands that can do that is possibly somewhere in between 1 and 2. Of course, if you do not listen to actual pagan/atheist black metal bands, and would never listen to Phantom, Neraines or even Graveland, how would you know this? Seeing as these clowns have no examples before them to give them some balls – the “orthodox Satanism” scene is led by queer bands such as Watain, Gorgoroth and Dark Funeral – they fail in everything they do, and of course the only passable moments are ripped right off Burzum’s debut and Darkthrone’s Under a Funeral Moon.
5) Lack of riffs. How is this even black metal? Half of the album sounds like deathcore chugging, and the other half sounds like glam metal. Burzum, Darkthrone and Mayhem all used melodic intervals at different points on their respective albums, and yet they never sounded like Mötley Crüe and Queensrÿche – like Gorgoroth does on Pentagram. Seriously, Infernus sounds like he’s trying to appear on MTV’s special documentary on 1980s hair metal. Weak willed riffs in the background, supposedly invoking the “glory of Satan”. But if you cannot write riffs, that is not going to be any good, is it?
6) The propaganda/lyrics. Alright, fuck any band that writes even a single word about anything from the Bible. That “book” has its place, in the garbage (and in churches, I guess), but not in black metal. You can have your own religion opinion, that is one thing, but don’t pollute an entire genre with your dogmas. To have a band like this that openly preaches “Satanism” and condemns the “sheep” that don’t believe in the “dark lawd”, this is ridiculous. Even NSBM bands are more tactful. Especially trying to spill this crock of shit in a place that was, at the time, more or less free from this kind of garbage is just disgusting. And no, worshiping “Satan” doesn’t make you less of a christian than worshiping “God”. Both are the same, and retarded.
It is a tragedy to have this band – and other “orthodox Satanism” turds like Watain, Behemoth, Necrophobic, Belphegor, Dark Funeral, etc. – in existence, as it defies everything that black metal has “worked” for since Bathory and the Norwegians created the genre specifically to escape the false God/Satan dichotomy that pervaded the other forms of heavy metal. Fuck this shit. Even the campiest of Amon Amarth videos is infinitely superior, and infinitely more black metal, than Gorgoroth’s turd Pentagram.
In closing I would just like to mention that besides being Satanic/christian, this band still sucks. Being as they are Satanic/christian, we need to get rid of them. I am very grateful that Metalious.com has this band on their roster, for it draws attention to degeneracy and weakness infiltrating our music.
These are the type of retards that would literally kneel before an inverted cross, and feel superior to those kneeling before one that’s the right side up.
The entire album Verminlust is absolutely frightening, to use one word. Unlike releases that try so hard to achieve some sort of intimidation factor by gimmicks and imagery, Vermin go around it the only way possible : sonically. Instead of having exceptionally over the top scary lyrical content, they stay simple, using disease, death, and other obscure topics as lyrical themes.
What makes this album scary is the way everything is carefully crafted to produce the darkest and most evil atmosphere imaginable. The best term I think I can use for it is horror metal, or almost blackened horror metal.
The music is blackened death metal in the vein of Phantom, Incantation, Demonecromancy, Warkvlt, etc, but is played in an even more atmospheric fashion, which precise and deliberate songcraft that puts even the most technical prog metal bands to shame.
Where to begin on this, the most awesome piece of blackened death metal ever to be released to assault the ears of man?
The best attempt at describing it was by a commenter on Metalious.com, who said it sounded like a car factory that has been rewired to play Burzum’s debut instead of make cars. I do not know if that was accidental or if they planned to make it sound that way, but either way it works really effectively.
Eerie atmospheric riffs and hyper-blasts, sick vocals, insanely cool song structures, three million riffs in each song, and all of them are your instant favourite. Not only is there no low point or mediocre song on this album, but I also cannot recall so much as a filler riff.
Verminlust is an incredibly concentrated effort to murder the world with brutal music that is at times melodic even, but always brutal, never gaying out. Some nice melodies can be heard during “Dormant Angel“, “In Memory of the Darkest Abyss“, as well as during “Endless Tears of a Shattered Hourglass“.
Other highlights include all of the songs, every single last one of them. People will think I am exaggerating, but listen to Verminlust and you will see what I am talking about. The riffs are so varied, tightly packed and atmospheric they make your head spin.
The only problem is they hardly repeat, and so you have to listen to the album 8 million times to get your dose of a certain passage or riff, something I have done already, and I am sure further black metal fans shall also do the same. Keep an eye out for this band, great things are coming in the future from them.
Best Black Metal 