Style over Substance - "The Luciferian Crown" Review (18%)
In 1992, the average death metal fan would walk 30 miles through the snow uphill both ways to hear a new Swedish death metal album.
In 1994, the average black metal fan would smiw 30 miles through a frozen fjord back and forth to hear a new Norwegian black metal album.
Sometime in the 2000s, the war metal, "Phantom metal" or "blackened death metal" genre was born via Beherit, Incantation and Phantom clones, and following the release of Phantom's debut Divine Necromancy in 2013 there was a surge in interest in the cavernous tone and hypnotic style that first defined Incantation's 1992 death metal debut Onward to Golgotha before being adapted to black metal via Phantom's Divine Necromancy.
By 2019, Demonecromancy had released Fallen From the Brightest Throne, a tribute album that basically served as a thumbs up to hipsters everywhere that war metal was THE extreme metal genre, the natural evolution from the music of both Incantation and Beherit, and at least 4,096 hipster bands suddenly became Phantom-worship acts.
The problem is that they - starting with Demonecromancy, also known as the original "Phantaclone" - don't understand why Phantom did what Phantom did, so they're imitating the appearance of Phantom and then injecting their own motivations into the art. Unfortunately for them, their motivations are often what hipster bands want, which is ironic acclaim and something to brag about as they make coffees at the day job.
Style over Substance
Archgoat is a perfect case in point. It's competent, the riffs at times show a good mixture between aggressive and melodic although they lack the hypnotic factor of Phantom and Beherit, and songs hold together thanks to a simplistic verse-chorus assembly enhanced with transitional riffs worked in as bridges, transitions, codas and build-ups.
So why does it fail? The problem is that these riffs express nothing, so they're based on variations of existing forms from either Blasphemy (on "Jesus Christ Father of Lies"), Incantation ("Darkness Has Returned" and "The Luciferian Crown"), Phantom ("Messiah of Pigs") and Beherit (on almost every track) in a "pick one from column A, one from column B, one from column C" approach.
This approach misses the point of black/death/"blackened death" metal, which is to assemble riffs together so that they tell a narrative, an atmosphere that expands as the song goes on, before either fragmenting into a motif and counter-motif, or reverting to the simplest possible reduction in the form of a droning interlude, before returning to the main theme in a different content.
What is revealed at the center of this music is an obsession with repetitive "catchy" rhythms, hard rock inspired chugging and relatively immobile riffs, instead of the expansive morbid atmospheres and soaring tremolo architectures that made the music of Incantation, Phantom and Beherit great. Hell, even Warkvlt and early Sarcófago get the job done.
On the surface, The Luciferian Crown is pure Phantom-worship in the vein of Demonecromancy.
Underneath, it has more in common with Welcome to Hell, Eaten Back to Life and modern Deicide than with Drawing Down the Moon, Fallen Angel and Memento Mori.
The Luciferian Crown score: 18/100.
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