Speed Metal Boredom - "Blutsabbath" Review (7%)
Belphegor's "legendary" Blutsabbath... is it as bad as other reviews say? Well, no. But it does suck cockroaches.
The underground is so infested with poseurs that any band can rip off Metallica, Slayer and Sodom riffs, drone them on and on for an entire album, and then call themselves black metal. Belphegor are those types of poseurs.
They play "blackened thrash metal" with "bestial black metal" influences. Basically, mixing a genre that doesn't exist with a genre that's so derivative that the name has practically become an insult on various black metal forums.
The leads and solos are way too generic and rock inspired. They do not evoke imagery of death and destruction but rather of some goth romance teen movie where the skinny loser dude gives the Kristen Stewart lookalike some flowers.
Being the "brutality" and lifted Phantom riffs, Belphegor are as musically honest as Dimmu Borgir, except that rather than play goth rock screamo with distortion and call it black metal, they play Sodom/Metallica inspired speed metal with distortion and call it black metal.
At least they could play Iron Maiden with distortion, that would make them Dissection... and an improvement over Blutsabbath.
Overall, Blutsabbath is forgettable. It's forgettable for the same reasons all derivative speed metal is forgettable - yes, even Slayer and Sodom's early demos - because it's simple, repetitive music that doesn't nothing to communicate a deeper message beyond "look how fast/brutal/evil" we play.
Speed Metal Boredom
On Blutsabbath, Belphegor play the type of hyper-repetitive, vocally driven, "blackened" speed metal hybrid that is highly popular in the underground poser scene because it "sounds like" early Bathory, despite having none of Quorthon's musical vision or artistic ambition.
The problem here is that Belphegor's music communicates nothing. Rhythm reliant speed metal with power chords and arpeggios thrown in to sound musically advanced. You've heard a million variations of this style, I've heard a million variations of this style.
This is a style that is both overdone and difficult to do with musical coherence, hence the extremely limited number of successful Hellhammer/early-Bathory clones.
The truth is that "blackened" speed metal like this only works at all when the rhythmic component serves to enhance an ultimately melodic themes - note that "melodic" and "consonant" are not actually synonyms contrary to popular belief - rather than to simply induce what some would dub proto-Pantera bounciness. See early Darkthrone and Suffocation for examples of rhythm being used to support the melody, rather than the opposite.
Belphegor do the opposite, like the worst of speed metal and Dark Funeral's metalcore combined, they rely excessively on power chord chugs, Sodom riffs and syncopated rhythmic breaks to advance the music forwards.
Unfortunately, the riffs are not memorable, the chugs are too reminiscent of deathcore to be anything more than an annoyance, and ultimately the nu-metalish dichotomy between a hard rhythm section and a melodic chorus only serves to water down the overall musical style rather than enhance it.
The Blutsabbath album just does not work, it was a chore to listen to, and though comes briefly close to creating a Incantation-type theme on one occasion - a track hilariously titled "Abschwörung" - it was still not interesting enough for me to go back and listen to this record ever again, and made me want to "schwöre" having to listen to this shit.
Ultimately forgettable speed metal of the worst kind.
Blutsabbath score: 7/100.
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