Buffoon Music - "The Somberlain" Review (34%)
Better get some morphine!
Proof that black metal's corpse is being paraded around by its clichés can be found in the buffoonery known as The Somberlain.
Think of Dissection's music as [b]lack metal waterboarding, except that it interrogates you until your inner buffoon is exposed... Grim, much like Franken Berry and Count Chocula are 'scary' in the cereal industry, Dissection frontman Jon Nödtveidt charges ahead with an additional copy of chromosome 21 to subject the listener to an assortment of mid 1990s black metal stereotypes.
As a result, the music is a potboiler of haphazardness in which nothing worthwhile is conveyed outside of dinky mimicry.
However, The Somberlain sounds like true [b]lack metal when you're a) retarded and/or b) not paying attention and/or c) deaf.
Perhaps people who don't listen to music will enjoy it.
The main problem with The Somberlain is the music itself: it's tame and boring. Not actively offensive like Summoning or Watain, but annoying enough to make you want to burn your headphones in an act of anti-cosmic vandalism.
All the songs cycle back between riffs. The structures are so simple that everything just runs in an endless loop.
The album's best moments are the melodic interludes, as they sound like Iron Maiden worship with distortion. They are quite pleasant, and the songs will occasionally take an unexpected turn and surprise you. But most of the time it amounts to nothing. And after one song, it wears thin real quick. Tracks are interchangeable. All the technical flourishes are just that, flourishes, and don't add anything to the music, sounding like unnecessarily bloated 'black metal' versions of what could be decent Iron Maiden tribute riffs.
Buffoon Music
Dissection play 'theistic satanism' inspired black metal.
Much like their peers in Gorgoroth and the posers Watain, they took their direction from whatever was most popular in the underground at the time and made a Satan praising parody of it all. Dissection chose Burzum's second album as their template for forcing Christian propaganda down on poor metalheads who are are too stupid to note that reversing Christianity's moralistic Good vs Evil axis is just a clever way of maintain its cultural significance and reinforcing its premises.
The music on The Somberlain is okay, if you listen to it like 1970s-1990s heavy metal. Explicitly not black metal, otherwise yes, it sucks. But not as much as the following two albums, Storm of the Light's Bane and Reinkaos which are also not black metal.
Perhaps I should describe The Somberlain's music. If you take Sentenced and Dawn's use of harmonic space in a linear fashion, add smooth and lengthy Iron Maiden inspired heavy metal leads, and complement the music with Hammerheat era Bathory riffs to build arching melodic structures, you get the blueprint used to produce The Somberlain.
Mediocre, but not actively offensive.
That's it. Non-offensive mediocrity made offensive through overt 'theistic satanism' - i.e. Christian - themes.
Yawn.
Listen to Demonecromancy instead.
The Somberlain score: 34/100.
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