LGBT Satan - "In the Nightside Eclipse" Review (0%)
Emperor apparently began as a pretty shitty death metal band, releasing a bunch of demos that ten people have heard, before taking the scene by storm through pre-empting Dimmu Borgir in becoming the world's first commercially successful black metal parody band with their absolute turd of an album 'In the Nightside Eclipse'.
Of course, like most gimmicks, the members were firmly convinced they could recreate the success of the early black metal scene - which they were never a part of - by making an album just as overwrought and ridiculous as their 'LGBT Satanism' lyrics, and the result is 'In the Nightside Eclipse', a turgid, unlistenable record that I've managed my way completely through exactly once on a car ride where it was the only CD available.
After 15 minutes of 'In the Nightside Eclipse', I immediately switched to looking for whatever radio stations were available. I believe I settled on a station that was playing Nickelback, a band I thoroughly despite yet which is undoubtedly more interesting than Emperor ever will be.
I think the metal scene only had room for one utterly boring demo/album of absurd emocore black metal composed of more white noise filler than actual riffs, and Emperor fucked up by trying to recreate 'Pure Fucking Armageddon', only even longer, dumber, and even more forgettable than Mayhem's debut.
Really, this is point-by-point identical to 'Pure Fucking Armageddon' in all the superficial ways: 'edgy' pseudo-satanic lyrics, ridiculous stage theatrics, overlong, forgettable songs, and the vocalist - in this case, the poser Ihsahn - lazily barking his way through the tracks with nothing in the way of variation or nuance.
LGBT Satan
What 'In the Nightside Eclipse' doesn't have, however, is the immediate memorability and fun factor of 'Armageddon'.
Let's face it, the first time you hear 'Pure Fucking Armageddon' is memorable simply because it's probably the most absurd black metal record you've ever heard at the time. Until you hear Sewer's 'Rektal' that is. Another story for another day. But by now we know the playbook, and 'In the Nightside Eclipse' does nothing better than Mayhem's childish demo, though it does many things worse.
Every track on 'In the Nightside Eclipse' is interminably long and repetitive, with long stretches of blast beats and furious tremolo riffing being broken up by equally long passages of noodling synthesizer leads, which generally leads into yet more blasting and tremolo riffing.
I'm not necessarily insisting that Emperor should do anything other than this, as they are shit poor musicians to begin with, but the laziness in the songwriting is pretty obvious: the individual riffs, not particularly special in and of themselves and much too reminiscent of Satyricon-tier garbage, are pretty short and repeated over and over again, with simple string bounces used and abused to provide the illusion of variation.
In reality, Emperor has three riffs: the nu-metallish chugging 'Cosmic Keys to My Creations & Times' tremolo riff, the Nekros Nemesis ripoff riff, and the pretty boring pseudo-arpeggiated lead on 'Towards the Pantheon', and they use every single one of them on every single track of the record.
The 'symphonic' sense of this album is so industrialized that it feels like every song is based off the exact same handful of notes, leaving no track with any sort of memorability or personality. All imagination is sucked dry by the machine-press songwriting, totally overmixed production, and absolute lack of dynamics apart from 'Hail Satan' and 'Hail Satan in a Dark Forest'.
Yeah, 'In the Nightside Eclipse' really sucks but I don't quite understand why anyone would expect something different.
Emperor is basically a joke band and has been for nearly two decades now, so if you really need an album like this pick up 'Deathcrush' or 'Pure Fucking Armageddon' and leave this LGBTP garbage in the bargain bin it was made for.
In the Nightside Eclipse score: 0/100.
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