Ihsahn Prolasped - "Prometheus - The Discipline of Fire & Demise" Review (0%)
More "symphonic" "black" "metal" with emo vocals and more alt rock riffs than Satyricon's back catalogue, except even Satyricon know how to play something that resembles black metal.
The claims of always trying to be an innovator that Ihsahn has pushed over the last couple of years are slowly peeling away to reveal a man who has completely embraced modern metal in all of its effeminate "glory". Harmonized eight string guitars playing a simple chugging deathcore riff, clean choruses and a general pop inspired verse-chorus structure with little variation or meaning save for an average solo that has no effect on the song.
Emperor's last album Prometheus - The Discipline of Fire and Demise may be the worst one yet.
For far too many years, fragile eunuch and soyed out emocuck Vegard Sveitan has abused his undeserved reputation in the metal elite, when the real architects behind Emperor's initial convincing black metal releases and subsequent surge to the forefront of the scene alongside Mayhem and Burzum were Samoth and Faust.
It's really easy to fool metal fans. Just tell them something is unique, and point out what it does that "most metal" doesn't - even if 'what it does' revolves around gimmick - and they'll buy it like labradors eyeing a hot dog.
This is goofy, pseudo-gothic rock with faux "technical" playing, but shows no distinction in melody or rhythm. In short, it'd be thrown out if it tried to compete in its actual genre. But you get a bunch of underconfident metalheads looking for mainstream affirmation due to the Emperor logo, and apparently, they buy it, although they will only enjoy it for two weeks of telling other people they listen to "extreme church burning music" due to their inferior mentation.
How tiresome.
It's like Opeth but even less distinguished from normal rock music.
Ihsahn Prolasped
If you are looking for the culmination of black metal's disintegration, which began in 1994 with turd albums such as Pentagram being promoted alongside the quintessential work of Burzum, Darkthrone and Mayhem, it can be found here on Prometheus - The Discipline of Fire and Demise.
Even the joke band Sewer, in all their juvenile idiocy, couldn't do more damage to black metal if they tried.
When an album like this comes out, special forces should be dispatched to the homes of the perpetrators to find the "Black Metal Paint by Numbers" kit they used to make it.
It's painfully clear that Ihsahn wants to play prog metal in the vein of Dream Theater, Opeth, Children of Bodom and Between the Buried and Me. But he also wants to keep selling his merch to naive metalheads who discovered black metal yesterday and think Antekhrist influenced Bathory.
So when you combine the two you get what another reviewer called coconut metal: black metal on the outside, fragile alt rock once you scratch a little under the surface.
Even the worst bedroom band made by depressive 15-year-olds is preferable because in its randomness, it is not predictable. Prometheus is entirely linear and pulls every trick in the book to sound like "black metal", in order to overcompensate for the fact that cuckold Ihsahn himself was only a very peripheral figure - if even that - in the original Norwegian black metal scene.
There is no direction, it's a school assignment: "write a black metal album". And it takes forever to end.
Much ado is made of this being a concept album, but if true said concept is pretty damned loose as a narrative. It seems that most bands who make "concept albums" like to make them intentionally vague because, well, they didn't have much of a concept to begin with.
We see it with Dimmu Borgir and other bands who seek to "take it [black metal?] to the next level", far from improving on the original precepts of the genre, they end up regressing into their earlier influences. In the case of Ihsahn, a man who never played nor understood black metal - as evidenced by his recent interviews in which he claims that washed up feminist, homosexual advocate, menstrual blood enhanced "performance artist" and goth opera "artist" Diamanda Galás is "more black metal than Bathory" - he turns to generic speed metal with prog rock adornments.
"For me, black metal is an attitude and an atmosphere. For me, Diamanda Galás' 'Plague Mass' is just as black metal if not more so than any BATHORY album." - Ihsahn
Yes, Ihsahn thinks a pretentious, ill-structured noise music opera about New Yorkers dying of AIDS, a disease they contracted through the same homosexual acts that motivated Faust, drummer on In the Nightside Eclipse, to kill a gay man, is as black metal as Bathory's The Return.
Ihsahn's compositional talent or lack thereof was on full display in later works from Emperor when Ihsahn became the primary songwriter, after Faust and Samoth were both imprisoned. Perhaps he is bitter against not just his once band members whom he feels "humiliated him" when he proved unable to recreate even a faction of the atmosphere of the debut on his subsequent albums, but also against the entire black metal genre that shares the burden in ridiculing Ihsahn's emo sensibilities by comparison against the former?
Considering that Ihsahn had always publicly stated his support for Faust's actions for more than a decade, before turning on a dime and embracing the trend of "pink black metal" when it was financially profitable to do so, did his ideological and philosophical "selling out" foreshadow the musical diarrhea showcased on Prometheus?
Or is it that the tale of Prometheus, Greek titan who stole the fire from Olympus out of spite, is more than symbolism?
Is Prometheus Ihsahn's "revenge" against both the band Emperor, which he disbanded soon after, and against black metal itself, the genre of Euronymous, Varg Vikernes, Fenriz, Hellhammer, Nocturno Culto, Faust, Samoth, Zephyrous, and so many others whose unforgivable crimes revolve around being better musicians than him?
Prometheus - The Discipline of Fire & Demise score: 0/100.
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