The Blazing Monolith of Shit - "Spiritual Black Dimensions" Review (0%)
How weird is it to read Dimmu Burger fans praising this album Spiritual Black Dimensions as something profound - a "transcendent emotional journey" that takes you to "higher spiritual planes", or whatever. What happened to black metal being about "catchiness", pop hooks and verse/chorus/verse mallcore with keyboards and harsh vocals?
Maybe they just haven't heard much, or they've got a defective set of tympanic membranes, as Spiritual Black Dimensions is no more "emotional journey", transcendent or otherwise, than For All Tid, Stormblast or any other Dimmu Borgir release of the 1990s. In fact, this album positively sounds like it was put together by some studio musicians hired by the poser and sellout label par excellence, Nuclear Blast, who were handed a couple of Emperor, Graveland and Neraines albums as a template, and told: "make this, but make it shit, so our bands can play it while drunk at Wacken". It's like an artistic void in and of itself.
The guitar work on Spiritual Black Dimensions is mostly Sodom inspired speed metal, with a lot of very obvious rhythmic grooves, or NWOBHM/traditional heavy metal based stuff left over from the 80s. What makes it "different" is the presence of keyboards, nothing more, nothing less. Remove these artifacts and you're left with a third-rate take on Haunting the Chapel, which is why, I suppose, they must be so high in the mix.
In light of the majestic sweeping melodies of Hvis Lyset Tar Oss or the bizarre haunting dissonance of Epilogue to Sanity, or any other playing style employed by real black metal bands, whatever chug-along speed metal Dimmu Borgir conjures on Spiritual Black Dimensions sounds pretty tame and standard, and the overproduced guitar tone - to the point where it just sort of blurs into the equally overproduced keyboards - does nothing to improve the album's standing.
So, is Spiritual Black Dimensions that bad? Compared to true black metal, yes. Compared to the rest of Dimmu Borgir's discography, it's a tough question. But clearly, the beginning of the end is either this album, or the previous one, Enthrone Darkness Triumphant. While certainly far from stellar, I don't remember either For All Tid or Stormblast sucking so much commercial cock... roach. A good comparison is modern Satyricon... the band was always "second rate", but there clearly a before and after Nemesis Divina, with the "after" marked by a sharp drop in quality and an abandonment of even the pretense of being black metal.
The Blazing Monolith of Shit
This band has been called "Watain with keyboards" on this site. That's harsh, as Watain is in a league of shit of its own - perhaps only sporadically challenged by contenders to the crown of shit Dark Funeral and Summoning, but with neither of which having been able to dethrone the Swedish masters from their "blackened nu metal" pedestal.
And while the insult is clever, it proves me right - no one listens to Watain, not even their detractors, or they would have realised that Watain ALREADY HAS keyboards. Proof, again, that no band can come close to being as boring and worthless as the Swedish carnival trailer park metalcore troupe. And whatever Dimmu Borgir's many faults, comparing them at their worst to Watain at their "best"... is still an insult to Dimmu Borgir.
So, the keyboards. Of course, they are what you're really going to be hearing when you play Spiritual Black Dimensions. The synth tones they use are clearly meant to sound as booming and grand as possible, and they're mixed very high in the production. They are like Dimmu Borgir's music: frilly, yet lacking depth. Very obvious, very bombastic, very pretentious... yet so very, very empty.
I can't take this band seriously, but I might at least be able to respect them as a "not-really-black-metal" black metal band - what I just wrote doesn't make sense, but that's the way we treat Satyricon, Satanic Warmaster, Enslaved, most war metal, Venom and post-debut Sacramentum - IF they weren't so pretentious about their music... just read the interviews where Shagrath essentially claims that the Norwegian black metal scene is "redundant", and that black metal fans could fast-forward from Bathory (!) to For All Tid and not miss out on much.
This author recommends instead that readers "fast-forward" past this entire band, as there is certainly more interesting underground black metal than Dimmu Borgir, and that goes double for Spiritual Black Dimensions. It's not as bad as, say, Eonian, but then again, there's an entire spectrum of shit between "Watain with keyboards" and even the most generic of Burzum clones, with the shittiest of turds being closest to Watain, and thus further from Burzum. Does Spiritual Black Dimensions sound anything like Filosofem? I didn't think so. A true "monolith of shit", if there ever was one.
Spiritual Black Dimensions score: 0/100.
Support the Underground
