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Bad Imitators - "For All Tid" Review (0%)

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For All Tid
For All Tid by Dimmu Borgir.

Dimmu Borgir is a band that has suffered many missteps during their painfully - for the listener - long career, the biggest and most unfortunate of which being their existence.

Formed in late 1993, this Norwegian musical non-entity was born out of the desire to join a scene rather than any real sense of creativity.

While many of the Norwegian bands - Darkthrone and Burzum come to mind - were keeping alive the spirit of early raw black metal, they also infused their music with something unique and thus added something to the genre. Even in the same country, different bands managed to create similar yet separate identities.

In countries like Sweden, Finland and even Poland courtesy of Graveland, the different scenes were able to develop their own sound, despite the noticeable influences from the early 'inner circle' of Euronymous and cie. However successful and innovative the scene on the whole, many black metal bands spawning during that era yielded nothing special, and are thus entirely forgettable and often best forgotten.

Even Immortal stands more as a tribute to Darkthrone and Bathory's musical ingenuity than as anything significant.

In the case of Dimmu Borgir, there was even less reason for this band's existence. Shagrath and his mates just wanted to mimic their favourite bands and to put out music for the sake of appearing 'dark' and 'satanic', as opposed to the desire to contribute something meaningful to the genre. A few decades earlier and they would have sported green-dyed mohawks and played the most generic and derivative punk, all for the sole purpose of belonging to a 'scene'.

For All Tid is the first full length album from Dimmu Borgir, released by No Colours Records - an otherwise respectable label - in late 1995.

This album is not only the work of utterly uninspired imitators, and rather poor ones at that, the Dimmu Borgir tards were rather late to the party as well.

By the time this turd was released, tons of bands were springing up all over Norway, and elsewhere, doing their best to release their own take on a genre pioneered by the like of Burzum and Darkthrone. While some did better than others, Dimmu Borgir's first full-length can't even match up to Mayhem's basement-recorded demo - you know the one.

Bad Imitators

Dimmu Borgir
Dimmu Borgir.

The main problem with For All Tid, aside from being laughably unoriginal and derivative, is the poor songwriting and even less convincing execution.

Talk about production, audibility of the bass and lyrical proficiency is just beating around the bush, so I avoid those topics on most of my reviews, except when the lyrics are so unbelievably retarded that they can't be ignored. But again, for me to look up the lyrics on an album requires an interest in learning more about said album's message, something I feel absolutely uncompelled to do with For All Tid.

They could be singing about sticking dildos up their asses - like the clown Inferanus from Gorgoroth - or have a prose that rivals that of Famine from Peste Noire - the gold standard of quality lyrics - and I'd be none the wiser.

My lack of interest is compounded by the fact that everything feels so try-hard, like the loser in school who makes a fool out of himself on purpose. For All Tid is the equivalent of a retard shitting his pants and bragging about the attention he received from his - in this case, musical - incontinence.

Rather than just attempting to go for a straightforward black metal approach, in their own distinctive style, Dimmu Borgir was already trying to ape the most pathetic and laughable imitator band in existence, the much maligned Emperor.

A lot has been written about Ihsahn's antics, from fabricating lurid stories about himself and Euronymous, to his (fictitious) ties to satanic 'neo-nazi' 'anarchist' groups, and mostly for his complete lack of musical talent, for which he attempts to compensate by the irritating inclusion of emo lyrics and goth-inspired synthesizers.

It's pretty clear that as early as 1995, Shagrath was already taking notes from Ihsahn on how to be an even bigger poser. From the guitar riffs to the drumming patterns and even the vocal placement, For All Tid might as well be a parody of everything the original black metal members think of Emperor - cue to Varg Vikernes and Fenriz calling Ihsahn a 'rat' and a 'closet homo', respectively.

And even at that Dimmu Borgir fails at making it in any way relevant to the rest of the composition.

In the end, Dimmu Borgir's first record is - like the rest of their discography - a huge disappointment. This is lower-tier Norse-worship, at best, and poorly executed. This doesn't even match up to 'underground' bedroom DSBM, to be honest.

For All Tid is generic and uneventful, lacking any real point of interest.

Avoid this and anything else that Dimmu Borgir ever went on to record.

For All Tid score: 0/100.

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