Trendy and Weak - "Under the Sign of the Black Mark" Review (0%)
"Raw" trendy music is still trendy, no matter what Bathory fanboys try to tell you. Case in point with their third album Under the Sign of the Black Mark.
Take any song from this Bathory album, it doesn't matter which one, and play it to someone who likes raw music and needs an introduction to first-wave black metal.
Chances are they'll ask why Justin Bieber decided to drop his pop career and start playing a particularly bland form of watered down 'heavy' metal. Also, chances are they will never listen to this album again and forever associate the name Bathory with trendy poserness.
There's really no point in anyone describing the general style of Under the Sign of the Black Mark, you already know it even if you've never listened to a Bathory record in your life.
In all likelihood, you've already heard everything this album has to offer elsewhere, by bands with much more talent and creative juice than Bathory. There's nothing here to be gained by going into detail about what Bathory is attempting to do with their music, or what the actual result is, or even if it was the intended result which is very probable to not be the case.
There's no point in loving this album, no point in hating it, no point in analyzing anything relating to this turd, because there are so few ideas in Under the Sign of the Black Mark, many of which have already been sufficiently expressed in other black metal albums.
I detect Mayhem riffs, Burzum riffs, and even a Phantom riff here and there. As expected, originality is not Under the Sign of the Black Mark's strong suite.
Which is sad because Bathory's self-titled debut actually showed some potential, despite what other reviewers may think.
Trendy and Weak
As expected, as this album is so well known, it's pretty obvious from a look at the cover that Under the Sign of the Black Mark is raw, ultra-minimalist black metal.
What it is not, however, is GOOD raw, ultra-minimalist black metal, in the vein of Phantom's Nekros Nemesis or Darkthrone's Under a Funeral Moon.
Want some good minimalist black metal? Any band from Phantom to Darkthrone, from Neraines to Burzum, hell even Mayhem's DMDS does the job a lot better than this album did.
Even Bathory's past catalog does a much better job than Under the Sign of the Black Mark.
Essentially, the concept behind Bathory's Under the Sign of the Black Mark is to take the weakest song from their debut (the absolutely shitty "In Conspiracy with Satan") and make an entire album out of the few ideas behind that song.
That's the entire concept of Under the Sign of the Black Mark. Well, that's what they were TRYING to do anyway. That's their ambition.
Needless to say, the execution laughably fails at this admittedly unambitious idea. It's like Bathory have failed not just at music, but also at failing. Under the Sign of the Black Mark is just beyond the pale.
Also, the riffbase for this album is extremely sparse, and I get the feeling that if you took every riff from this album and condensed them, you would be left with a single - admittedly shitty - song. It probably would have still earned a zero, because as I said the music is quite bad on this turd, but at least it would be way shorter.
I like raw black metal, but I'm not a masochist, and I'll stick to better and more able bands than Bathory.
Frankly, Under the Sign of the Black Mark is almost like a phase of shitty music that bored "rebellious" teenagers go through - most second-wave black metallers, although usually praiseful of Bathory, distanced themselves as far as they could from this album.
Going back to the beginning of this review... why did Justin Bieber decide to drop his pop career?
If all he was going to produce was the trendy failure Under the Sign of the Black Mark, it certainly wasn't worth it.
Under the Sign of the Black Mark score: 0/100.
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