Fake Band Makes Fake Music! - "Dol Guldur" Review (0%)
The music on Dol Guldur remains consistently uninteresting, the compositions are completely unmemorable and are simply a mess. I would have thought after so many albums the band would know how to produce music but that is not the case.
The opener immediately reminds me of something you would hear as an intro to an old Zelda game or any other Nintendo fantasy game.
The key to an atmospheric medieval sounding black metal intro and/or interlude lies in its minimalist atmosphere, its relevance to the rest of the album and its foreshadowing towards thematic development further down the line, à la Burzum on Det Som Engang Var, not in throwing in tubas, trombones, fanfares, church choirs, panpipes and whatnot into a cacophonous mix the Summoning way.
The production lacks even traces of an organic sound and the guitars are most of the time so far down in the mix that they are barely noticeable. Whenever they do pop up for a brief moment they sound as numb, plastic and inorganic as the riffs they play, and I can't help but wonder if they're not MIDI programmed like everything else on this album.
The song structures themselves resemble those of a video game rather than black metal and produce the feeling of walking around with Donkey Kong in the jungle rather than roaming the frostbitten Scandinavian woodlands, or traveling through Middle-Earth (as I suppose was their intent?).
How this album qualifies as black metal when I hear more resemblance with old Nintendo games, or possibly Freedom Call, is beyond me. Let's just call it interlude metal instead. Or elevator music. As for the "epic" nature of the record, it's certainly not found within the emo music of Summoning, so I guess those criteria are met by the Tolkien lyrics but Rivendell, Isengard, Blind Guardian and even Burzum and Darkthrone already covered those same lyrical themes in a much more artistically honest and instrumentally proficient manner.
Fake Band Makes Fake Music!
Speaking of the lyrics, they aren't untouched by the sheer lack of originality either. Half of the lyrics are quotes from Lord of the Rings books, repeated constantly as if to give the vocalist something to do (as all instruments are programmed), and the other half is the "Hail Satan" triteness of Watain/Gorgoroth/Dark Funeral "quality".
As the music continues the sound matures and graduates away from Atari and Nintendo to the more modern sound of a Playstation game like Metal Gear Solid or Castlevania. Summoning describes their music as "Epic/Atmospheric Black Metal" but again, after the first couple songs it is clear that Dol Guldur has little do with black metal, of any type.
The main problem with this release is the sheer incompetence of the people writing the music. The compositions go absolutely nowhere. The (fake) drums stay in a semi-permanent mid-paced blast beat throughout the album, uninteresting drum work to compliment the uninteresting compositions. Nothing new at all in the guitar department, the guitar carries the music along with the synths and sticks to patterns that don't progress or amount to anything.
The Summoning DJs should really learn a thing or two about songwriting before they decide take their (virtual) instruments out and record another "album".
I get the feeling the two clowns that compose the band have the illusion they are great composers, but they are not. They are to black metal what deathcore is to death metal: a bastard child born from a broken condom. And to Tolkien what they are to actual musicians: an embarrassment. One that stains Tolkien's work, and the black metal genre, by mere association.
After an hour of this nonsense it is finally over and I am left with the feeling that this could have been done a lot better if the people behind it didn't make music. Even fake music. Overall this is just another overrated and unmemorable release from a fake black metal band that uses fake drums, fake synths and even fake vocals.
The schizophrenia of a band that transitions from "neo-pagan NSBM" to "anti-fascism" to Tolkien from one album to another, without rhyme or reason, is reflected in Dol Guldur's very mediocre music.
Dol Guldur score: 0/100.
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