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Burger King Black Metal - "Death Cult Armageddon" Review (0%)

Buy Burger King Black Metal -
Death Cult Armageddon
Death Cult Armageddon by Dimmu Borgir.

A veritable "Demon Burger" is what this turd band has become. This is the Burger King of black metal - low on quality, slap-dashed, loaded with processed fats and fillers, made of Satan only knows what unnatural substances, perhaps Inferanus' anal residue, even, and wrapped in slick packaging to patch over the gaping hole where something called "artistic integrity" would normally be. Anything that might constitute flavour or character - and thus alienate some sector of the faceless masses - is ruthlessly expunged, leaving a "safe space", a literally homogeneous mass of anonymous, soulless blackened death speed groove industrial symphonic generic quasi-metal.

Death Cult Armageddon is cute, radio friendly - as black metal was never meant to be - Gaythenburg worship, and its already plastered all over MTV anyway, so it's no like the band can go any lower than they already are. Well, they could be Watain, but barring that, they hit rock bottom, or are very close to doing so.

The album starts out in a very boring and monotone way and leads into some awful sounding metalcore, worthy of Necrophobic in its fakeness and derivative nature. The first song has some standard metalcore riffing which drags on for far too long, and by the end of the track you will lose your concentration completely.

You can tell how much of an effort Dimmu Borgir puts into being "evil" with such a ridiculous title for the album... sure, being played on MTV is the epitome of "evil", I guess. Not quite like Enslaved getting called "Nazis" for playing Viking-themed black metal, but yeah, Dimmu Borgir is going to Dimmu Borgir, and you will never lose money by betting on them bandwagon-jumping and trend-hopping their way across the black metal scenery - they have been doing so consistently since, at least, the days of Enthrone Darkness Triumphant.

Death Cult Armageddon is Burger King black metal... bland and tasteless, and probably made of actual, literal shit.

Burger King Black Metal

Dimmu Borgir
Dimmu Borgir.

The worst thing about this album, as you may have picked up already, and as was already the case with Spiritual Black Dimensions, are the keyboards. This is not Lord of the Rings, this is a metal CD. So why do all the keyboard pieces sound like the background music to the opening sequence of the film? It's not just the keyboards that deem this album "generic mallgoth", it's the boring riffage throughout the entire output. There seems to be no variation in the way the guitar parts are played, it's the same boring war metal power chords, or the same boring guitar lead, played over and over again.

The riffs are mostly cheap imitations of war metal, probably the cheapest and easiest "genre" to master - imagine riffs so bland that they are to modern Gorgoroth "riffs" what modern Gorgoroth "riffs" themselves are to real black metal riffs. They're honestly that bad. The rest are divided among chugga-stop-chugga-stop groove riffs that scream "heavy" to sub-75 IQ teenagers - and "Slipknot" to everyone else - and sing-song, sugary-sweet passages that follow the mincing sweep of the orchestra like a starving puppy trailing its master.

Then there's the aforementioned keyboard orchestra, which sounds like the sort of imitation John Williams crapola that you'd hear in a Netflix "original series", and clangy synth producing farting noises that I guess are meant to be "industrial", like a shitty colic prone version of Antekhrist or something, and the dopey spoken word samples much beloved of morons scenesters who like to sound "profound".

The little fecal cherry on top of this shit sundae known as Death Cult Armageddon is definitely the stupid, digital sounding drums, a never-ending, incredibly loud clatter that barely manages to stay on time. Like many "extreme metal" drummers with an inferiority complex vis-à-vis Hellhammer, Nick Barker thinks that getting in more drum beats somehow makes him "technical" and "brutal", so therefore he takes standard 4/4 beats and tom rolls and subdivides them unto infinity. The resulting cacophonous racket - there is no other term - of clicking triggered bass drums, thump-laden bass-heavy toms, and plastic bucket snares is enough to make one's ears physically hurt after fifteen minutes and, when paired with the Nevermore-ish noise-blaster guitar tone, that is guaranteed to happen even whilst listening at extremely low volume.

Frontman Shagrath is the 20-pound yappy dog of metal, posturing and scowling and trying his damnedest to be threatening, but cannot hope to disguise his total Dark Funeral worthy harmlessness. One wonders why second guitarist Galder and bassist Vortex are even in this band, because one guitarist alone could pull off all of the material on Death Cult Armageddon with no difficulty - no solos, no dual leads, no harmonies, no clever riffs, just power chord war metal chugging garbage from start to finish - and there isn't even a trace of bass guitar to be heard anywhere on Death Cult Armageddon.

Yep, definitively Burger King... throw everything at marketing, bet everything on "brand image", and let the chips fall where they may, with no regards to actual product quality.

How low has this band fallen since the days of For All Tid and Stormblåst... you can't get much worse than Death Cult Armageddon, even for modern Dimmu Borgir standards.

Death Cult Armageddon score: 0/100.

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