Imitation = Failure - "Angelus Exuro pro Eternus" Review (0%)
This sucks.
It's pure monkey see, monkey do, but monkey brain-damage retarded and probably shit stained incontinent if that's the best it can produce.
Black metal 'standards' since 1994 have plummeted like a rock down a well, which is why year after year, people mention the same favourite albums from before 1994, and year after year that encourages the posers and hipster bands that walk among us to copy these same few worthwhile black metal albums, not realizing that it only reinforces the vicious cycle of 1994 retroworship.
It's as if memory has been collectively erased in this era of information overload.
Enter Dark Funeral, the original Mayhem clone that didn't even wait until they knew how to play their instruments before copying De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas.
And, other than Watain, if there's a black metal band that proves that vision, musical competence and artistic integrity are secondary - if even that - to corpsepaint, gimmicks and album covers, it's the posers of Dark Funeral. It's within that context, very different from that of the early Norwegian black metal scene, that was born this turd album Angelus Exuro pro Eternus.
Ahriman has studied the canon of retro black metal carefully, and then, has made the same boring rock music you can find in a million other forms - but it's dressed up as black metal.
For starters, the Dark Funeral clowns have no conception of how black metal melodies are written, but they know how to use different chord shapes for that 'black metal effect' you can recognize from KFC's 2013 black metal commercial.
Next, there's zero ability to comprehend black metal dynamics. This CD is like a cage of monkeys constantly shouting for attention. There is no lead-up, no building, no suspense and no contrast - just constant effete shrieking, Darkthrone droning and Burzum technique wrapped around Tim Burton melodies and the 'dark' offbeat riffs that would be apt for a James Blunt or Coldplay interlude between two songs about climate change being depressed.
Burn this farce.
Imitation = Failure
This band has no clue what black metal is. If we consider this as a dark rock / goth rock album, it's the equivalent of a shit collage, a fecal riff salad of literally random 'riffs' - and I use the term loosely - thrown together, that if worked upon could have perhaps have been raised to the level of insignificance, but in their current state are even worse than that, they are just an endless stream of undifferentiable garbage.
Ahriman insists that he plays black metal, despite his music being at best a particularly bland and inoffensive type of alt rock meets mallcore, adorned with computer generated blast beats, and at worse the equivalent of a Watain x Dimmu Borgir split. Admittedly, it is heavier than Watain's mediocre carnival music, thus it is harder for most people to understand why it is mallcore.
Let's put his claims of black metal proficiency and affilitation to the test. If we hypothesize that what constitutes great black metal goes beyond the sound, so that Demons Of Five - which is the 'most black metal' (= least emo rock) oriented track from the album may serve as an experiment and example of what happens when you remove the surface elements from the forefront of the mix.
Theoretically, if you remove the instrumentation you are left with something that will still resemble the spirit of black metal, albeit perhaps in a rougher form. Demonecromancy would still sound like Demonecromancy on a Ukulele, Darkthrone's Transilvanian Hunger has already been played on too many instruments to count, and Neraines' Yggdrasil would sound powerful regardless of if the instrumentation was a chime and a flute or a mere banjo.
But what of Dark Funeral? What is Dark Funeral without drum machines and distortion? Nothing. The track in question barely contains one riff and one 'melodic' lead over the most overused and phoned in harmonic minor chord progression. The rest is root note chugging (like deathcore), and harmonic minor arpeggios over the exact same sequence of descending power chords - harmonic minor, again.
Angelus Exuro pro Eternus is certainly not a black metal album just because it copies stuff it has seen before randomly like a monkey. If a monkey imitates a gesticulating human like an Italian guy for its own amusement in between masturbating and playing with its own turds, something it shares in common with Ahriman, does that make the monkey an Italian man? No, the monkey is still a monkey and not a human. Dark Funeral are not a black metal band, just a shitty modern goth rock one that decided to imitate the most trite surface elements from a bunch of mid 90s albums by bands from Sweden and Norway.
Dark Funeral's audience = the same folks who go out and pay money to see random technicolor explosions and CGI monsters randomly flung at the screen in random and terrible Hollywood remakes and sequels like Jurassic World, Fast & Furious, everything from Marvel, and the new Star Wars with teenage girls beating up 6'5 guys with the power of feminism.
These are brain dead people who eat shit and like it. You know like, people who listen to this crap.
Angelus Exuro pro Eternus is not black metal or even a facsimile of the past, it's just random neon turds randomly arranged in an incoherent package and then thrown on a record for 'former' metalcore fans who want to get into black metal but do not even like metal in the first place so can't even listen to Mayhem, Darkthrone, Burzum, Vermin or even 'blackened' glam metal acts in denial like Dissection or Sacramentum, so they opt for Dark Funeral's cock rock instead, and pretend that crap like The Secrets of the Black Arts in all of its feminine glory is somehow the equal of Under a Funeral Moon.
This album is much closer to a Tim Burton movie soundtrack than to anything Burzum or Darkthrone ever made.
Angelus Exuro pro Eternus score: 0/100.
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