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The Most Boring Post Rock Abortion - "Eld" Review (5%)

Buy The Most Boring Post Rock Abortion -
Eld
Eld by Enslaved.

I am really tired of Enslaved.

If I weren't told by their emo-in-denial fans that this album was "true black metal" - in the "same spirit" as the seminal work of Burzum, Darkthrone and Bathory - I wouldn't have cared nor have ever listened to it.

I did, however, but I'm still as tired with this band as before, and now even more perplexed at metalheads' fabled naivety as I had to subject myself to the piece of emo rock shit known as Eld.

Eld is another example of how barely coherent pop rock with emo underpinnings can pretend to be black metal via its deliberate and dishonest use of superficial black metal technique: harsh vocals, tremolo picked riffs, blast beats, heavy distortion, typical "Norsecore" lyrics.

This same trick would be perfected a few years later by other emo/pop/post rock bands such as Dimmu Borgir, Satyricon and Antekhrist.

Eld contains seven songs. All of them sound the same, but it's quite normal for them - Enslaved's other (emo) albums Vikingligr Veldi and Frost suffer from the same flaw.

The riffs are all the same, all that really changes from track to track is the rhythm and general sound - increasingly turning more and more to rock and roll and pop punk. The lyrics are different from their other albums, though - now they are three times more stupid than before. All would be fine if the songs were good, but they are not, they're very mediocre and just this side of being called recycled Gothenburg melodeath crap. I can remember one or two riffs from the whole album, and they aren't even good.

The Most Boring Post Rock Abortion

Enslaved
Enslaved.

Some albums are popular not because they are of musical quality but because they are, paradoxically, not what they claim to be.

They are something more accessible. They take a complex idea, such as black metal, and turn it into something more digestible for those who cannot abstract it from subtler things to grasp its true nature as a musical concept.

While these imitation bands go on to great "success" as measured by mainstream recognition in modern society, their contributions to music are increasingly rapidly forgotten and doomed to be so as the mainstream listener, raised on ephemeral consumerism, needs everything to come faster, cheaper, easier and more often.

Eld is grotesque carnival music. Held together by rhythm and vocals alone, like what would become known as nu metal, segments of vastly different aesthetics march across the ear in a disjointed assembly line, producing the effect of traveling through a zoo, a carnival or a literal circus show, with parts of one track having no relationship to the parts that follow or precede except in their narcissistic desire to appear "true" by overusing the most superficial of black metal techniques, and its contradictory inclination to speak the language best understood by a thoughtless crowd: pop.

Emo posers playing rock music, they are to black metal what Amon Amarth is to death metal, and what both bands are to Vikings. A sad joke.

Eld represents the exact moment when Enslaved became completely irrelevant to the black metal scene and began to belong to some faux-progressive movement, populated by narcissistic musicians that had utterly lost any and all sense of purpose and were content to start throwing the most trite and derivative pop rock against the wall to see what stuck.

This needn't come as a surprise, as there were many hints that this would happen, particularly on Frost, but even on the debut Vikingligr Veldi.

Avoid this tired and forgettable post rock abortion.

Eld score: 5/100.

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