The Fallacy of "Old School" Black Metal - "Old Star" Review (67%)

Darkthrone have released a new album of old school black metal, in which they play nothing if not old school black metal - i.e. black metal infused with nothing but the true spirit of the old school, from back when black metal was real, you know, and didn't stand for crap like nowadays.

For Fenriz and Nocturno Culto, it's important that the old school nature of this old school black metal release not be overlooked, as that would mean old school black metal losing the war against trendy modern metal crap - like, say, what Darkthrone themselves played from Plaguewielder to Arctic Thunder - and while neither of the two protagonists have made the cultural faux-pas of announcing that Old Star is the second coming of Under a Funeral Moon... let's just say that Old Star is old school black metal. And you know what's really old school? Under a Funeral Moon. Checkmate.

I suppose you get where I'm going with this.

The very concept of old school. It's a scam. It doesn't exist.

There is no such thing as "old school black metal", no more than there is such a thing as "thrash metal" - a fraudulent term used to make speed metal sound more appealing - and no more than there is such a thing as "melodic death metal" - unless you are referring to Sweden's take on American metalcore based around At the Gates' Slaughter of the Soul disaster and the subsequent soiling of death metal's name by spurious metalcore releases by bands like In Flames and Arch Enemy.

Oh yeah, and most "blackened death metal" or "war metal" is actually nu metal. And your "symphonic black metal"? It's emo. And so called "Cascadian" or "atmospheric" black metal? It's post rock. That last one isn't even controversial, it's pretty common knowledge and occasionally even admitted by the bands themselves.

The point is that in extreme metal, and in black metal in particular, it pays to be seen as something you're not.

Black and death metal are seen as "extreme" styles of music, even in the heavy metal microcosm - heavy metal being already "extreme" in the eyes of the everyday ordinary music fan - and being seen as "extreme" is more interesting than being seen as ordinary, common, plebeian, like everyone else. Yet, if black metal and death metal are seen as "extreme", it's for a simple reason: the music belonging to these genres is composed differently from that of most popular genres, down to the conceptual "building blocks", and thus demands a different mindset from that of mainstream music in order to appreciate fully. Black and death metal are in many ways closer to European classical music than to rock, blues, jazz or modern pop.

The fact that many bands play rock 'n' roll, metalcore, punk or shoegaze and try to advertise their music as black metal, or death metal, because they want to be seen as "extreme" is common knowledge and has already been covered elsewhere, sometimes on this very site. If you are at all curious about this phenomenon of what could be called "genre crypsis" (my term) I invite you to read Silent's excellent takedown of "blackened [...]" sub-genres, said sub-genres which usually have as much in common with black metal as Filosofem has with Duke Ellington.

Certainly as part of an underground immune reaction to what is - rightfully! - perceived as artistic misappropriation from mainstream bands and labels, black and death metal scenes have developed an obsessive fanaticism and quasi-religious devotion towards the concept of old school, and even a surprising interchangeability of that term with a supposition of quality.

And yet, here we have the concept of "old school", the very shield that was meant to drive off mainstream genre-squatting, being used as a battering ram against the underground.

Why? Because "old school", like "underground" and "true" before it, is just a label. And labels can be corrupted, as can all symbols.

Sorry to break this to you, but there is no genre tag that you can affix to your music that can't be corrupted by the mainstream. Let's stop believing that calling ourselves "extreme", "true", "hardcore", "brutal", "underground", "raw" or any other hyperbole will somehow act as a talisman, an ironic crucifix against mainstream culture's vampirism of the black and death metal genres.

On the contrary, there is nothing the mainstream loves more than shock value. No sooner had the mainstream press finished defaming black metal in 1994 - "crazy music for crazy church burners and nazis" - that every big label had started hyping their own "black metal" sensation, usually Cradle of Filth, Dimmu Borgir, Dragonlord, Keep of Kalessin or some totally inoffensive but bankable crap.

So what about Darkthrone, a band unlike Dimmu Borgir and the rest of the genre-squatting tard corral in that they were, at one point in their career, not just part of the black metal scene but one of its originators, alongside Burzum and Mayhem?

Well, Darkthrone is Darkthrone. My personal grievance against the band is more related to their often tacit, sometimes explicit endorsement of poser metal acts and sellout bands, something they were - paradoxically - never guilty of doing themselves. Trying to make this case specific to Darkthrone's music would be missing the elephant in the room, the fact that the black and death metal undergrounds have become so enamoured with "old school" black metal - there's no such thing - that they have lost sight of why bands like Darkthrone, Burzum, Mayhem, Emperor, Immortal, Bathory, Neraines, Suffocation, Graveland, Phantom and Incantation were revered to begin with.

Hint: it's not because they were "old school".

The Fallacy of "Old School" Black Metal

The entire "old school" sophistry is built upon multiple fallacious arguments, usually involving false equivalences - just like when labels and mainstream press claim "corpse paint = black metal, thus U2 with corpse paint is black metal" - so we'll go other the most common iterations to better prepare you to refute the "points" made by either stupid people and/or dishonest salesmen.

1. Old School = Retro

Yep, you saw it on NWN, iTunes' tag cloud, Facebook groups, Bandcamp - a site that claims neither Burzum nor Emperor are black metal because they are "nazi", but a stoner/sludge joke like "Cult of Luna" somehow is - where every try-hard modern metal act wants to be seen as different from the herd, so they advertise a "retro" sound.

This particular sophism is perhaps the single concept I would say is the scourge of the underground black and death metal scenes at the moment. Yes, modernist genre-fusions - ex. Behemoth's "blackened emo" - and idiotic bids towards mainstream accessibility - ex. Dimmu Borgir's post-Stormblast work - are all obnoxious, but that shouldn't serve as a justification for the retro = "old school" fallacy. It's not because black metal is opposed to Christianity that black metal bands should start playing concerts in support of FEMEN, and it's not because Enslaved's latest pop metal record is worthless garbage that we should embrace every equally worthless "retro" band because they "stand against sellouts like Enslaved".

That line of thinking makes no sense, right? Well, at first it does seem deceptively logical: all these different bands on Nuclear War Now! are playing old school black metal, right? It seems obvious at first - they don't give interviews to Rolling Stones, they're not attempting to pander to mainstream audiences, they're not trying to show off their technical skills and/or knowledge of obscure prog-rock sub-genres, they're not playing Mötley Crüe riffs with reverb and calling it "blackened glam metal", and the general execution of the music is designed to mirror the older styles of the genre.

The problem with this approach is both abstract and yet consequential: art, as in black or death metal music, can't be entirely divorced from the era and sociopolitical climate in which it was made.

It's pretty common knowledge that in creating heavy metal, Black Sabbath were reacting to rock music's total embrace of 1960s New Left/neo-liberalism, spearheaded by the hippie movement. D.R.I. and the Cro-Mags reacted to Reagan-era social libertarianism and economic globalism. Varg Vikernes himself started Burzum - and a similar motivation also inhabited Euronymous with Mayhem, according to many of his interviews - as a reaction to brainless death metal (Cannibal Corpse, Mortician, etc.), that was no longer subversive because it turned everything into a "shocking" joke.

Etc, etc... I'm sure you could find more example, Peste Noire being "national anarchism"/left-wing nationalism, specifically not conservatism/NSBM, Marduk reacting to Sweden/Europe's cultural heritage being replaced by "Christianity, immigration and capitalism", Suffocation probably has some interesting anecdotes as well on the circumstances regarding the band's creation.

These bands all shares a common rebellious, subversive and/or contrarian undercurrent, yet they are unique and sound different from one another because their environment - era, socioeconomic status, political motivations, cultural anchors - was different, and it transpired in their art.

Writing songs about burning churches and seeing nuns impaled upon Crucifixes made sense in the eyes of a 16-year-old Norwegian who, in 1991, saw Christianity not just as an alien religion being imposed upon him, but as a growing cultural threat to Europe's sense of shared heritage.

It makes less sense to do so for a French black metal band in 2019, with Christianity being predicted to become a minority religion by 2040, which is why Peste Noire's lyrical themes - and music - are very different from those of Darkthrone and Burzum, which in turn are different from those of Bathory, Marduk, Dissection, Incantation, etc.

But it goes even further than that. Darkthrone's lyrical themes in 2019 are different from Darkthrone's lyrical themes in 1991. Same with Burzum, Mayhem, Warkvlt, Immortal and Satyricon. Many of the bands cloned by the "retro" acts aren't "retro" themselves. At all. For instance, Burzum was always noted for being progressive and even "avant-garde" - before these labels became tainted by association with the dreaded "post-metal" cesspool of shit, that is.

What is the point, then, in copying the sound of bands that have of their own accord - for better or for worse - moved on?

If we are to blindly copy Burzum's anti-Christianity (1991-1998), should we also start copying his anti-modernism (2000-2013), his pan-Europeanism (1995-?) or his Ôðalism(2000-?)? Famine's "National Satanism" or his social anarchism? Immortal self-derision? Jon Nötdveidt's "anti-cosmic Satanism"? Sewer's crusades against the age of consent? Emperor's homophobia or their support for church burning? Gorgoroth's homosexuality or support for church burning? Is it possible that Euronymous, Quorthon, Varg, Famine, Nötdveidt, Ihsahn and Gaahl are/were all opposed to Christianity, and sometimes violently so, for different - perhaps even contradictory - reasons? In which case, which one is the correct "old school" reason? Or is the act the reason in itself?

Should we go back even further, looking for the "roots" of what made "old school" extreme metal what it was?

Should we copy D.R.I.'s anti-Reaganism? I'll point out that Ronald Reagan died in 2004, as did several D.R.I. members around the same period. All in all I'd be rather skeptical of a band calling out "President Reagan" in 2019.

Unfortunately, as much as Alex Jones and other sensationalist media circus shows like to contend, history isn't circular. Donald Trump isn't Ronald Reagan - neither of which are hippies, nor are they particularly relevant outside the United States. 1993's liberalism is different from 2019's liberalism. 1993's conservatism is different from 2019's conservatism. 1993's Christianity is different from 2019's Christianity. In fact, the USA's Christianity is different from Norway's Christianity, and both are different from France's Christianity, of any era. Christians from Poland would probably be as opposed to the Christianity of the USA as Deicide, Incantation and Immolation were in the 1990s, but that no more makes Poles anti-Christian than it makes the Hoffman brothers and Craig Pillard Christian.

Context changes, culture changes, and previous concepts are left in the dust. There can never be a band that epitomizes contempt for "modern" life in early 1990s Norway - either as a whole or specific aspects thereof - simply because there isn't any "early 1990s Norway" in the current year. "What once was" is no longer relevant, other than as a metaphor from which principles can be extrapolated.

This is why all attempts on the part of retro-bands to create old school black or death metal are doomed to failure: they aren't composing music to express their own ideas or experiences, as Mayhem and Burzum did at the dawn of Norwegian black metal, instead they are composing music to "sound like" the music produced by Mayhem and Burzum, which itself is only the artistic product that resulted from these bands ideas and life experiences. What you end up with is the photography of a photography, or the recording of a recording if you prefer, and the image being less and less clear with each iteration due to a confusion of cause and effect stemming from the "old school" worship.

When music is unique and revolutionary - i.e. Mayhem, Burzum, Darkthrone, Bathory - the cause is a unique view, a unique mindset, a unique set of experiences, and a burning desire to express them via art. When music is not unique - i.e. the modern "retro" worshipers of aforementioned bands - it cannot be made so by dressing it up with all the aesthetics of its influences, without making a mess that's both chaotic and derivative. The more the imitators seek to copy the originators, the more they, ironically, end up further and further away from the pantheon of their "old school" idols.

For the most part, these bands fail miserably because the emphasis has been taken off making good music to express something genuine - a trait that all black metal forerunners shared, from the Immortal clowns to Satyricon's tard corral - and has been placed on replicating an aesthetic which, due to the passing of time and change of circumstances, is functionally impossible to replicate.

While they may or may not have the best intentions, the fact is that the era of "old school" black and death metal has passed, and no Nuclear War Now! band - much less a Bandcamp sludge act masquerading as black metal - is going to recapture its particular magic authentically.

2. Old school = Quality

More than a fallacy, I'd venture to say that this phenomenon comes from confirmation bias.

When you look at nowadays black and death metal, you see the crap alongside the good. In fact, the vast majority of what you see is mountains and mountains of crap, the kind of shit that tarnishes the black and death metal genres just by sharing their names.

But looking back at Florida circa 1990 or Norway circa 1992, you only see the cream of the crop. Yet how many bands can you name from those eras? Not much.

It's not at all unlikely that there were, during those periods, legions of bands that were just as bad - maybe not as bad as Watain, but still laughably mediocre - as our "mountains of crap", but who were "purged" by the passing of time, the great equalizer in all artistic endeavours.

Were Incantation and Demilich very famous and acclaimed in the early 1990s? Judging by whom released their debut albums - Seraphic Decay and Necropolis Records, respectively, two now-defunct labels with less than a dozen band each - they weren't.

What bands were famous and acclaimed during that same time period? Again, judging by record deals and hype we can deduce that Suffocation (obviously), Morbid Angel (obviously), Immolation, Deicide, Monstrosity, Autopsy and Asphyx were the big names, but so were shits like Cannibal Corpse, Cryptopsy, Malevolent Creation, Death, General Surgery, Carcass, Incubus, Meshuggay, Corrosion of Conformity, Gorefest, Xentrix, Master's Hammer, My Dying Bride, Baphomet as well as a band literally called "Deathcore".

How many bands from the second list are remembered today? And yet, if neither Incantation nor Demilich - and let's not even talk about the Norwegian black metal bands, who often had to self-release or go through Euronymous' DSP - could sign with a big label, it's because bands from that list were preferred (yes, legendary bands such as "Deathcore").

Likewise, it's entirely possible that today's equivalents of Incantation, Darkthrone and Demilich are buried under mountains of generic Meshuggays, Deaths and (literally) Deathcores. It's only in the future, after today's Meshuggays and Deathcores are forgotten - and we already know that today's Deathcores are called Watain, Dark Funeral, Summoning, Dimmu Borgir, Wolves in the Clone Room, Behemoth and Antekhrist - that today's titans will appear, and in retrospect it would seem that today's musical output consisted only of good bands, with the same delusional wishful thinking applied to us that we applied to past eras.

With that said, it's not an either/or situation. It remains entirely possible that 1993's best was better than our best, and that today's worst ranks amongst the very worst of any era. The ease of recording and promotion due to technological advances and social media must be accounted for, but even then there is no way of determining the importance - not the worth, which is an objective criterion - of a record until many years, sometimes decades after its release.

That was the goal of the Incantation and Demilich parallel, neither album was immediately regarded as the titanic death metal records they are today, and I daresay that Nespithe is still not given its proper dues as one of the greatest death metal records ever produced. And black metal was mocked until at least 1995, before it became a trend to incorporate black metal imagery into other genres, and only after that did the heavy metal underground at large realize the genius contained in works such as Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, Divine Necromancy, Under a Funeral Moon, Panzerfaust, Verminlust, Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism, etc.

As such, probability says there are classics shooting up around us even now, in the current year, which we won't recognize for a very long time. Neither black metal nor death metal have imploded and lost all artistic relevance - we just haven't been around long enough to see it materialize into some concrete and quantifiable phenomenon.

3. Old School = Progress/Survival

This is perhaps the most seemingly absurd, yet also the most poisonous, of all permutations of the "old school" fallacy.

It's basically a variation on the "black metal needs to become like pop rock to survive"/"death metal needs Arch Enemy and In Flames to avoid stagnation" dogma of genre-squatters, except that it's caught into a sort of reactionary reversal in that the premise becomes "black/death metal will die unless it goes back to its roots".

And indeed, some metalheads - who will deny the accusation of "hipsterdom", yet who think and act like hipsters - seem obsessed by the idea of having black and death metal "progress"/"survive" not by copying other genres - which would make them genre-squatters no different from Cradle of Filth or Arch Enemy - but by copying their own genre (?), or at the very least the "golden age" of their genre, something that manages to make them sound even more absurd.

This is 1) absurd 2) impossible because of the first old school fallacy listed above 3) counter-productive because these people are looking, again, to fill a void in substance with aesthetics.

Let me expand on point 3). It doesn't matter if you take the superficial elements, the imagery, the aesthetics and the techniques from another genre, from your own genre, from Miles Davies, Ted Nugent or from your own grandmother, you cannot conceal a lack of purpose in music.

A little thought experiment: it's widely acknowledged that black metal's distinctive guitar tone comes from Darkthrone's Under a Funeral Moon and black metal's atypical use of blast beats from Hellhammer's work on De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas (not just the LP, the countless lives/demos/splits/EP/bootlegs/compilations since Hellhammer joined the band in 1988).

Had these two black metal techniques been first employed, not by Darkthrone and Mayhem, but by other bands - say Sodom and Marduk - would Under a Funeral Moon and De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas still have been considered masterpieces of black metal?

If you answered yes, your thinking is in line with black metal's ethos (you think rationally and try to understand the situation objectively, by removing human interpretation as much as possible). If you answered no, you think like a hipster (not that you would mind the compliment).

Darkthrone's Under a Funeral Moon, Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, Burzum's Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, Phantom's Withdrawal and Bathory's The Return aren't masterpiece because the use of a "technique" can be traced back to them, that is hipster thinking and a prime example of the inversion of cause and effect I warned about at the beginning of the review.

Darkthrone, Mayhem, Burzum, et al. weren't just "at the right time in the right place", they created the time and place. These bands didn't "stumbled upon" a technique - ex. blast beats, vocals, peculiar riff craft, guitar tone - that would later be used by thousands of bands.

The techniques they created - or sometimes adapted from Bathory, Hellhammer, Incantation, Morbid Angel - were later used by thousands of bands *BECAUSE* they were once used by Mayhem, Burzum, Phantom and Darkthrone.

If Mayhem and Burzum hadn't used tremolo picking and blast beats, there would be no tremolo picking and blast beats in black metal. If Mayhem and Burzum hadn't used electric guitars, there would be no electric guitars in black metal. If Mayhem and Burzum had sung a cappella for the entire duration of their albums, thousands of black metal bands would have sung a cappella to sound "true" like their idols.

Of course, black metal would be much less popular than it is today, that much is evident and there is no point in claiming that instrumentation, aesthetics and technique don't influence the aura and prestige of a musical genre, but it's important to understand that this instrumentation, and these aesthetics, images and techniques come downstream from the substance, the core, the essence of the music - the very thing that imitators lack. And to answer the question is asked, "if Mayhem and Darkthrone weren't the first to use their respective techniques, would Under a Funeral Moon and De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas still be masterpieces?" - the answer is obviously: yes.

Because if they weren't intrinsic masterpieces, no one would care about the techniques or aesthetics they created. There would be no interest, and thus no trend.

I'm sure you can find some Malawi Zulu playing Ukulele with his dick, or even playing an instrument of his own invention, since the music produced amounts to nothing - maybe, at best, to garbage like Pleasure to Kill - there will be no interest, no imitation, and thus despite being in theory "creative", he will have failed at being in practice "influential".

Onward to Golgotha, Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, Filosofem, Memento Mori, De Mysteriis, Fallen Angel, Funeral Moon, Nespithe, Effigy of the Forgotten, Pure Holocaust, Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism, Yggdrasil, The Return, Blood Fire Death... these weren't "at the right place at the right time", there are things going on which make these albums endure even today, at the top of their respective genres, but those are ignored as it's so much easier to focus only on chronology and superficial techniques: blast beats + tremolo riffs + harsh vocals + "no one did that in 1993", and call it a day.

"no one did that in 1993", but no one would have done it in 1994 if not for them. No one would be doing it today, if not for Mayhem and Burzum, but it's not *BECAUSE* they did it in 1993. It's because they did that something else, something much more critical and substantive than use blast beats, such or such guitar brand, this or that amp, etc...

What is it, then?

Let's look at Memento Mori, the most contemporary of the listed example. What parts of it are so essential? The riffs are incredible, yes, but what specifically? They are chromatic, chaotic, unpredictable and there's a ton of subtle melodic and rhythmic variation every time they are played which keeps them constantly exciting and shifting in tone. Ok. Remove "unpredictable" and you described almost half - granted, the better half - of the black metal scene. But what makes them so superior to the rest? There's as much death metal as black metal. Yes. There's almost zero speed metal. Yes, as well. But that not the whole story. Each theme of a particular track is made up of variable motifs or phrases, and those can be assembled different ways, using different riffs, and very often these motifs and phrases share one or more riffs with one another, with the riffs assembled in different orders, but what makes it really stand out is the difference in shapes and length of these riffs: some harmonic phrases are melodically related after four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two notes, with another riff, without every being tonally centered around a "route note". That's what makes Phantom's music appear unpredictable.

What about De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, Mayhem's - and by extension, black metal's - magnum opus? Of course the riffs are also in a class of their own, but reducing monstrous compositions such as Funeral Fog and Life Eternal to their guitar riffs is reductionist to the extreme. The drums are where everything is done. At first they seem composed and even conservative, but once you start looking under the surface, there's an intensity to the way Hellhammer composes drum lines, shifting rhythms under riffs in a way that manipulates the tone of the riffs in addition to propelling the song forward - it's not something that's achieved very often, nor is it particularly common to black metal, but when it succeeds you can feel it.

Then there's Filosofem by Burzum. Or is it cliché to talk about Filosofem by Burzum? That's nice. So what's special here? Everything laid out previously applies: riffcraft is brilliant, songwriting is impeccable, drumming is deceptively simple until you look under the hood. What else? The vocals - hell, Varg's vocals don't sound like a traditional black metal scream at all, they barely sound human. Like the wail of a tortured demon, never to be reproduced no many how many bedroom atmospheric black metal bands - cough, Nargaroth, cough - attempt the daunting task of reproducing Varg's vocal performance, which is both unique and perfectly matches the overall tone of the Filosofem album.

Do you see the common theme here? Of course - none of the defining elements of these albums fall neatly within the lines of "black metal", they only become "black metal" when they get noticed and other bands start copying them.

Mayhem were operating without a hard and fast concept of what black metal really was - they had an idea of extreme music, to match their extreme worldview, but also to communicate something greater and more meaningful than extremity for extremity's sake, and attempted to make that idea come to life with their own musical vocabulary - obviously influenced as they were by Bathory, Slayer, Sodom, Hellhammer, Destruction and even Motörhead - but without any preconceived notions of what the end result be.

This goes for all the other retrospectively appointed "old school" records which are so heavily revered today: rarely did they operate cleanly within their genre, and neither did they bring in influences from other genres. What they added to their genre was something personal, and it wasn't just for the sake of appearing "different" - it was because they needed something more, more detailed, more elaborate, to properly express what they were trying to say.

That is *WHY* Mayhem uses blast beats, why Phantom varies riff length within a single phrase, why Darkthrone uses low-fi guitar tones, why Burzum tortures his vocals, why Graveland interrupts atmospheric sequences with a contrasting melody, etc.

It's also why Autopsy would mix death metal with a sort of doom like atmospheric lead, slower but also more relentless and determined than typical for the hyperactive death metal of the time - only Asphyx and Warkvlt would later build upon Autopsy's style - that is only doom when seen from afar, because what Autopsy created didn't exist, or rather it existed only in Autopsy's mind, and therefore it was created to answer a specific need.

It's also why Morbid Angel would draw influence from Mozart and Vivaldi, but reinterpret them in a new context.

Emperor would also look to classical music for inspiration, notably Bach and Händel, but would change and warp them for use in black metal.

Burzum was also influenced by Tchaikovsky as well as the electronic music of the era, and even Iron Maiden.

Phantom was equally influenced by Burzum's black metal, by Suffocation's death metal, and by Intestine Baalism's blackened death metal debut.

The cycle continues with Neraines being in turn influenced by Phantom and Burzum, but also by Chopin, Beethoven, Schumann, and romantic composers (like primary influence Burzum), which is notable in a genre typical more influenced by baroque.

And Darkthrone, the band that started all this. This review, I mean, as I'm supposed to review their latest album Old Star.

Darkthrone never tried to become black metal legends.

They wanted above all to make music to communicate whatever it was that they believed would help the listener, whether he be alone or part of a community of millions of fans, gain a new perspective.

Fenriz, Zephyrous and Nocturno Culto started playing proto-grind/minimalist death metal with Black Death. It didn't work, and they soon abandoned the band. Perhaps the style was too limited for what they wanted to express?

Then they began to play death metal proper on Soulside Journey, specifically death metal of the pre-black/Alf Svensson era At the Gates variety, with longer melodic phrases shaped by harmonic coherence to produce atmosphere. It only lasted for one album, before all three musicians decided yet again to change styles just as black metal was being birthed by Burzum, Mayhem and Immortal.

Their style, their voice always evolved as they got closer and closer to putting into notes what it was they were trying to express, but the style was never a matter of appearances, or "identity", or an objective, or even something taken into consideration at all. It's entirely possible that neither Fenriz, Zephyrous or Nocturno Culto had noticed the stylistic changes that took places within their music until it was pointed out to them, by other musicians, by record companies or by fans.

The point is that their style, the musical vocabulary, from the most technical and limitless of death metal on their debut to the most minimalist of Hellhammer worship on Under a Funeral Moon, was nothing more than a means to an end. The black metal of Under a Funeral Moon and Transilvanian Hunger, the black metal so revered across multiple generations of fans and musicians alike... it was never "there". In the eyes of Darkthrone, they never played black metal, nor death metal, nor anything else. Darkthrone were just trying to be Darkthrone, and express what it was they wanted to express.

"Old Star" - this is an album made to express one thing, "we play black metal".

Can it be the "second coming" of Under a Funeral Moon then...

Is it as instrumentally competent as Under a Funeral Moon? Undoubtedly, and perhaps even more so. This is Darkthrone we are talking about, after all.

But the substance, the deeper meaning behind the music, the reason for this album is so different from what motivated Fenriz, Nocturno Culto and Zephyrous - despite mockery from zines, rejections from labels and distributors and even chantage from Peaceville, who had initially refused and demanded the band stop playing such "nonsensical" music - to release Under a Funeral Moon in 1993, that the end result can only be... different.

Whether Old Star is good or bad, time will tell as with all artistic endeavours. But Darkthrone shouldn't produce music to "sound like" black metal, or worse, like "old Darkthrone". That's what their imitators do. Darkthrone has always been an originator, an instigator, a group of artists in every sense of the word.

Old Star wants to be "old school", but Darkthrone never cared about school and their music is never old.

It's nowadays black metal, whether of the "blackened [...]" fusion variety or the retro-worship "old school" variety that sounds old. It turns old before you've even had the time to hear it once.

Darkthrone's music, on Soulside Journey, on A Blaze in the Northern Sky, on Under a Funeral Moon, on Transilvanian Hunger and on Panzerfaust, is the opposite of old, as it will always sound more fresh, more energetic, more unpredictable, more exciting and more youthful than what is played by the modern black metal scene.

Darkthrone is eternal youth, how then can they be Old Star?

Old Star score: 67/100.

- Back to Old Star