Summoning – Boring MIDI “Black Metal”

Summoning = Fake Black Metal.

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.