Boring Blackened Screamo - "Vobiscum Satanas" Review (0%)
I wasn't going to write this review. The fact that I did means that I listened to Dark Funeral's unintentional parody of black metal Vobiscum Satanas again, which means that said amount of times is an integer larger than zero - and that happening will forever weigh down on my conscience, keeping me awake at night in the sad and lonely nights of melancholy in which my aching heart returns to the day I witnesses black metal die under the assaults of Dark Funeral's barely crypto emo rock.
Terrible, painful, worthless lyrics aside, the core issue with this album is a bad case of boring.
Now, Dark Funeral are clearly a Swedish screamo band masquerading as a metal band, like their butt buddies from Watain, but that's not the real reason why Vobiscum Satanas doesn't even have the punch to build itself up so it can fall apart on its own... this is an album in which nothing ever happens.
The guitar riffs never shy away from tremolo-picked harmonic minor scale runs to sound cartoon-villain "evil" - sometimes they use natural minor to sound Disneyland "epic" - which at timed intervals stop to give way to post-rockish acoustic sections.
That's it.
The whole album Vobiscum Satanas is composed of just two things. You have the "loud" sections, which are all walls of noise generated by guitars played with a spaced out reverb-heavy tone over some very generic drumming. In contrast to the loud parts, we have the "soft" sections, which are slowed down harmonic minor chords - like in post rock or boredom-inducing emo - which may or may not have drumming underneath.
Neither of those two elements are pulled-off in an interesting fashion, and that's basically what the entirety of Vobiscum Satanas is like; just those two things going back and forth and transitioning between each other for an hour, with the exact same style of screamo vocals with a tinge of black metal all the way through.
Nothing else happens here, there's no real use for eight whole tracks with an average duration of four and a half minutes each when you can take any of them at random and play it on a loop for the exact same effect.
Boring Blackened Screamo
There might be an element of mood and feeling at work here, some kind of lingering concept within that I'm missing.
Lyrics wise, I could go on a long-winded essay about how fat sixteen year old girls could write better "odes to Satan" than "Ineffable King of Darkness" by cutting words (with twitter emoji!) on the flesh of their thighs, but to achieve such transient level of understanding upon the aesthetic aesthetics behind the inner workings of Vobiscum Satanas, I'd have to read all of its lyrics again. No thanks.
On the other hand, nobody would want that friendly fellow with the half-shaved head, thick-rimmed glasses, skinny jeans and holding a can of Bud Light at the front row of a Dark Funeral concert to be distracted from this hypnotic, entrancing all-emphatic voyage through the album's "dark atmospheres" by way of anything even remotely resembling a change of pace out of octave-harmonized tremolo picked sections. That would be too "extreme".
Fuck this band and the "genre" they (mis)represent.
Dark Funeral is "blackened screamo": generic hardcore punk riffs, screamo vocals, goth chord progressions with blast beats to give the plausible deniability of heavy metal music.
It isn't metal. Screamo (and metalcore) by closer to both rock and punk than metal, I don't see how anyone with room temperature IQ can be fooled into believing Vobiscum Satanas is anything more than Watain meets My Chemical Romance with distortion, angry/drunk vocals, juvenile "satanic" lyrics and blast beats.
Vobiscum Satanas score: 0/100.
Support the Underground
