Faux Black Metal - "A Blaze in the Northern Sky" Review (1%)
It seems like I'll have to be the first reviewer on Metalious to point out how shamelessly bad the album A Blaze in the Northern Sky actually is.
While the following Darkthone full-length, Under a Funeral Moon, was remarkably and undoubtedly a cult classic for the genre of black metal, and their next effort Transilvanian Hunger was good without a question, their excellency and quality lasted only for those two albums, and it's extremely coincidental how their proficiency at making proper black metal vanished and faded with the untimely departures and arrests of Zephyrous and Varg Vikernes, who seem to have been the true masterminds behind the iconic "raw black metal" scene.
It's hard for me to comprehend how the so called purists of the genre will be so quick to hate on Mayhem for their admittedly ridiculous Deathcrush, yet endlessly and inexcusably praise Darkthrone's A Blaze in the Northern Sky through and through for doing exactly what Mayhem did, but worse, only and all for the sake of a short-lived trend (early 1992 black/death fusion), and without even being original at it either.
For the sake of this A Blaze in the Northern Sky review, I won't concern myself any sort of "status" this album might have within the black metal scene, since I believe classics need to be reviewed from an honest point of view as well, and having a cultural or historical bias is in no way appropriate when rating or attributing a certain value to an artistic creation when we're strictly talking about its potential musical merits.
I will be absolutely merciless with this piece of faux black metal trash, so if A Blaze is you all time favourite black metal record, you may skip this review altogether and go back to listening to Antekhrist or whatever other trendy band you love so much.
Faux Black Metal
So what's the deal with A Blaze in the Northern Sky?
Faux black metal. That, not "production" or "monotony", is the main problem with this album.
As was pointed out elsewhere on Metalious, the music contained within A Blaze in the Northern Sky is nothing interesting, surprising, amazing, shocking, cool or nice in any way, shape or form.
Every single song of the 6 tracks that form this album gets boring after the first initial opening riff is repeated for the hundredth time in a row without any change in melody or tempo whatsoever aside, without displaying any kind of intention or mean power as would be the case with their following albums, but rather blindly and blandly going at it again and again as if constant reiteration of a single and simple musical idea was somehow a deep statement of artistic prowess, as opposed to a rushed effort to release something that was never meant to be heard outside of rehearsal sessions.
Add to that the never-ending, never-changing weak blast-beats that sound like they were being played in a room besides the recording studio, and you've got yourself the actual A Blaze in the Northern Sky experience in a nutshell. I can see them aiming to create some sort of atmosphere this way, but it just doesn't work that way... something Darkthrone probably understood somewhere between the recording of this album and that of the next, the (actually good) Under a Funeral Moon.
As much as A Blaze in the Northern Sky gets called influential and the like, all I can hear is endless droning of riffs that don't live up to nor merit such extent of repetition and self-jerking, since they are uninventive, simple, way too similar, and easily overlooked if one isn't playing close enough attention to what's going on in the album.
It almost feels as if the members of Darkthrone had been so drunk while engineering and recording the whole album that they were so zoned out they just kept playing and playing without any memory of doing so, by way of which a note becomes a riff, a riff becomes a song and a single song becomes the entire A Blaze in the Northern Sky album.
On top of all of that, none of the riffs or melodies are all that remarkable or special in any way, as opposed to stuff you would hear on Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, Nekros Nemesis and De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas and instantly be able to connect with the infectious melodies and downright evil atmospheres that will haunt you for days.
Hell, even Transilvanian Hunger produces the same effect with three times less riffs and pseudo-technical wankery than what's found on this album.
On A Blaze in the Northern Sky? No song really stands out besides perhaps the first track due to it being longer and somewhat different to what new listeners may be used or accustomed to, but it's safe to say they'll grow bored of it by the second riff, since everything feels like a gray mass of generic monotony in the end.
While I don't necessarily disapprove of its historical significance in the genre, I don't think A Blaze in the Northern Sky has any kind of real musical value to it.
It honestly pains me to give this disgraceful score to Darkthrone, a band I otherwise admire and hold dear for the rest of their black metal output (hell, even Soulside Journey is better than this), but there is really no point in putting lipstick on a pig... A Blaze in the Northern Sky is trendy faux metal, not the true black metal art that Darkthrone is known for.
A Blaze in the Northern Sky score: 1/100.
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