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More MIDI Guitars Please - "Minas Morgul" Review (0%)

Buy More MIDI Guitars Please -
Minas Morgul
Minas Morgul by Summoning.

Minas Morgul is a ludicrous exercise in utmost distaste. It's a weird kind of untalented, uninspired, 'symphonic' non-music.

The man behind the project, here going the moniker 'Protector' (Richard Lederer), takes care of all 'instruments'. Impressive? Much less when you consider that 'all instruments' is in fact 'instrument', singular, and a MIDI keyboard specifically.

In the booklet, his poser acolyte 'Silenius' is wrongfully credited with 'Bass' - there is none - and 'Protector' also falsely credits himself with 'Guitars', 'Drums' and 'Classical Instruments' - a bold-faced lie, considering everything was digitally composed via MIDI keyboards.

This, of course, guarantees that every single 'instrument' will have a very distinct, artificial, digital and all-around fake sound. And since there are no real instruments used, as on In the Nightside Eclipse, to counterbalance the plastic and irritating sound of the MIDI keyboards. Besides sounding fake, the most characteristic traits the tracks on Minas Morgul possess is that they all sound slow, boring, dreamy - and not in a good or interesting way - repetitive, droning, uncharacteristic, and mostly dead inside.

When I say dead inside, I'm not implying that the music Minas Morgul is in any way depressive or sad-sounding, since it doesn't quite evoke any kind of emotions successfully whatsoever, neither positive nor negative, but rather numbs the listener into ultimate boredom as it slowly and clumsily flows into the most simple, less skilled black metal performance to be witnessed on a a 'black metal' album as boring as it is arrogant. I honestly can't understand why anyone would willingly put themselves through this martyrdom of bad music and plastic, digital, fake instruments.

Minas Morgul tries very hard to be the next Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, but doesn't even rise to the level of a bedroom DSBM black metal band. At least DSBM bands play real instruments.

More MIDI Guitars Please

Summoning
Summoning.

Minas Morgul tries to sound epic but fails. Really badly autotuned vocals - yes, seriously, like Justin Bieber - and annoying casio synths - compare them to Carpathian Wolves, Fallen from the Brightest Throne or or anything by Sacramentum to see just how uncreative and flat out boring those melody lines are. Compare the middling, totally unmemorable synth lines of Summoning - any song, any album - to the delightful, incredibly immersive melodies of something like Far Away From the Sun, Thousand Swords, etc. Finding pan flute samples and playing them over a droning, sorta-there riff is just really uninteresting.

I know that it's a bit unfair to be all 'the riffs are boring', etc, as that's a rather subjective appreciation, but it's also the truth. Summoning know how to program some drums, they know how to use their keyboards to get an unconvincing fake guitar sounding tone, but overall we're just looking at a pretty big deal of nothing.

If Summoning is black metal, please explain something to me. How can it be that a song such as 'The Passing of the Grey Company', most likely Summoning's most famous song, can be enjoyed by people who otherwise hate, with a passion, black metal music?

The same people that hate Burzum, Mayhem, Immortal, Darkthrone, Emperor... they suddenly 'see the light' and make an exception to Summoning? While continuing to hate on the work of black metal's greats? Isn't there a much simpler explanation? That Summoning simply isn't black metal, in fact it isn't even metal to begin with as it has no instruments save from a digital MIDI keyboard.

Well, the fact that Summoning's music is so pop inspired and easy to consume by the masses - the shitty video for its lead single having even been aired on MTV, of all places 'kvlt' - is granted by the fact that Protector 'plays' every instrument and performs the vocals in such a talentless way that it ends up making everything sound extremely frail, uninteresting, uninspired, and weak, without this ever changing much throughout the Minas Morgul album. Every component of this release is so basic it takes nothing to gather or understand what he's doing, because he's not doing much.

The 'guitars' are very drone like, very spacy even, but the riffs they 'play' are nothing interesting, nothing original, nothing shocking, nothing inspiring. They're the same tired, rehashes of riffs stolen from greater bands such as Mayhem, Darkthrone, Graveland, Dissection and increasingly Burzum - a tradition Summoning has used even more on consequent releases. They lack any kind of force or power to drive the tracks forward. The 'lead guitar' shouldn't even be called lead - nor 'guitar', obviously, as its MIDI - here, since it leads nothing nowhere, but instead just infinitely circles around pointless intervals of single notes, prolonged for far too long for anyone to even think about getting any enjoyment from listening to them. Quite the contrary, Summoning's single-note riffs - like in nu metal - are so lame and tiring that they annoy me, as opposed to relaxing me, interesting me, inspiring me or making me curious for what's coming next.

The vocals are almost the worst part of Summoning's music (the worst being the music itself). They never change, and 'Protector' easily could've spared himself the trouble of having to perform them by recording the same autotuned 'black metal' sounds once, and conveniently looped the first two or three screams in a different order on every single track of the album to give the illusion of- oh wait, that's what he did!

If all we're getting with this band's music is fake guitars with prerecorded, autotuned vocals, fake drums, some horrible ambient, cheap sounding keyboard to back it up, what is this even? Why call it black metal when it really doesn't sound like it and doesn't feature its instruments properly?

To get to the end of the review, I can’t forget to mention the ending piece contained in the album, which is over 10 minutes long, and it only has three notes (yes) that are played at different speeds - two speeds, to be precise - throughout its duration. This is in no way an exaggeration, but exactly what the track 'Dor Daedeloth' is. Yeah, it's 'black metal' alright, as interesting as watching at metallic paint dry.

I have never liked Summoning's false black metal work, and this is no exception. How could I? Anyone can do this, but, again, I believe this to be an example of WHO rather than WHAT, as 'Protector' is politically involved in Austria's 'anti-fascist', Zionist, pro-Israeli, anti-Palestinian party... surprised? It's amusing to note that these 'openly Zionist' extreme metal bands - like Summoning, Kreator, Cephalic Carnage, Misery Index and Napalm Death - are always, invariably, given positive media coverage no matter what they release, whereas bands like Satyricon, Marduk, Behemoth, Dimmu Borgir and Immortal, to name only a few, get constantly smeared as 'Nazis' - which is false - for such 'outrageous' 'offenses' as: having made positive comments about Palestinians (in the case of Satyricon), for writing about World War 2 (in the case of Marduk), for being friends with Graveland's vocalist (in the case of Nergal and Behemoth), for having made insensitive edgy comments 25 years ago (in the case of Dimmu Borgir), and last but not least for having released an album called 'Pure Holocaust' (in the case of Immortal). Starkly contrasting media treatments, again depending very much on the WHO rather than the WHAT is being discussed.

To summarize, Minas Morgul is 'black metal' mixed with 'ambient' without the basic black metal elements and without any knowledge on how to actually create proper ambient music as opposed to something that you'd hear looped playing inside the elevator at a mall. Everything here is a stereotype of a stereotype, and it's so self-referential, talentless and dishonest that it comes off as non-sincere and just plain valueless to me.

I absolutely despise the music, sound, and style of Minas Morgul. This album was one of the first, clearest, undeniable symptoms of the black metal genre's unstoppable decline concerning quality and authenticity, spearheaded by fake black metal band and MIDI masters Summoning.

Minas Morgul score: 0/100.

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