The Epitome of Mediocrity - "The Secrets of the Black Arts" Review (0%)
With a membership experienced in peddling vapidity - Necrophobic and Hypocrisy - Dark Funeral knows exactly how to unleash constant barrages of over sampled/triggered blast beats, tremolo riffs, and 'X2reeeem' vocals yet still put you to sleep.
This is more of that vapid Watain-core you hear when deafkore fans discover Reinkaos on Youtube and decide to make a 'x2reeeeeeeeM' black metal band whose goal is to be 'br00dle' and 'kvlt'. With a bio that claims the band came together through 'sharing a vast affinity for black metal and alcohol', it's obvious through the lack of organization and stylistic cohesion that the band united through Alcoholics Anonymous while watching MTV.
This generic and crappy Watain-core reinforces my aversion toward bands that were made after 1995 whose names include the words 'dark', 'true', 'winter' or 'satanic'. You get the pseudo-melodic dumbed down Burzum riffs that mall music titans and goth rock heroes Summoning are known for churning out, but then you get the cheesy 'melodic elements'. These sound like tremolo picked metalcore melodies of Slipknot variety thrown in between reverb heavy post rock chord progressions - not 'riffs' - over monotonous drum machine blast beats for 'dynamics', and they're really distracting; going from incongruous brutality, to boring post rock à la Dimmu Borgir, to stadium rock riffs barely disguised through distortion and tremolo picking.
A typical song on this album will start with a generic black metal riff, but a lack of focus soon sets in as what sounds like ideas from 3 different - metalcore, nu metal and post rock - projects fight each other for space in songs where the only cohesion to be found is through the incessant drum rhythms that keep things 'fast' and 'br00dle'.
Riffs are constantly repeated over the course of a same track in the modern blak-meddle style of sandwiching disparate ideas in between tremolo picked scale chug afterthoughts.
The Epitome of Mediocrity
Nothing about the Dark Funeral band or this Secrets of the Black Arts album stand out.
I see what they're trying to do: constant blasting music like Marduk. The problem is that unlike Marduk, they don't 'get' black metal so they end up playing screamo with distortion. Screamortion.
This in conjunction with the screamo logo, screamo member affiliations - Hypocrisy is deafkore not death metal, the first Necrophobic was ok - and screamo photoshop imagery paints a picture of a band who focus grouped a path to a Century Media summer released 'blast beats 101 for dummies' album in hopes of being taken seriously by the 'trve kvlt' music - actually muzak - community.
This band is talented to a certain degree at making generic Wataincore music, before it devolves into a modernist sham, so if I can offer any advice to them it would be to dump certain members, remove or come up with real riffs - not nu metal chugga chugga - and to spend more time structuring their music to seem like ONE idea unraveling from its beginning to its conclusion, and not MULTIPLE ideas thrown haphazardly into 5 to 6 minutes of time.
I would recommend they change their band name and adopt different monikers as well to avoid the embarrassment of having released this failure.
Avoid this mediocre crap.
The Secrets of the Black Arts score: 0/100.
Support the Underground
