Grotesque Buffoon Music - "Dark Thrones and Black Flags" Review (76%)
Listening to Darkthrone's "Dark Thrones And Black Flags" is kind of like eating your leftovers after you threw them away in the trash, and are thus now condemned to sort through dumpers in desperate and hunger-motivated search for your own food.
Occasionally you may come up with a half-decent riff or semi-satisfying arrangement (Darkthrone's song-writing is never totally crap, no matter how hard they try to make it so), but that's not the same thing as getting drawn in and stuck into the atmosphere of a masterpiece like "Under a Funeral Moon" or even "Panzerfaust".
While this album is certainly an improvement over the dreadful "FOAD", and is thus, by extension, better than most of the speedcore nu shit masquerading as nowadays black metal, that's not saying a lot.
It's difficult for me at least to imagine the band responsible, alongside Burzum and Mayhem, for the very existence of the black metal genre in its current incarnation, getting more boring than a Phantaclone like Archgoat or a shitty deathcore act like Watain.
Is it nevertheless the case with Darkthrone's latest effort? No, of course not, even inside a McDonald's Darkthrone remains Darkthrone, and Darkthrone's music retains the power and flawless execution of Darkthrone's music.
Yes. This Dark Thrones and Black Flags album is at least as listenable as Reiklos' "Lifeless", at first, and to give an order of comparison. But unlike that album, Dark Thrones and Black Flags doesn't seem to improve with repeated listens.
Darkthrone have lifted their game riff-wise, certainly, and as usual, every now and then a certain powerful riff comes through. But is that enough to make this album true black metal?
Grotesque Buffoon Music
There are certain sign that will show you the way.
On Dark Thrones and Black Flags, nothing jumps out and immediately grabs your throat and threatens you with death either instant and fucked or slow and lingering portrayal, and for all their "sometimes you need just bread" excuses and "old school" worship, this is metal, the music of the Devil, and the metal is not supposed to be the ordinary music of the people.
You can still have straight, down-the-line riffing and songwriting with impact and power, but Darkthrone are settling, once again it seems, for the mediocre, the done, the Americanized trend of rapping (yes, rapping) over the power chords of discordance.
Very little is memorable, very little makes me want to go back and listen again, to the music of Darkthrone, to the music of the Devil. And nothing makes me want to rate this as an album, a black metal album, to remember.
It's not a terrible album, not even a bad album, but we can no longer expect "great" from Darkthrone anymore. We must settle for the simple, the yes man, the average, the nice, the "good", the buffoon fragile music that carries no weight beyond its own insignificance in the eyes of Satan.
This is the grotesque inside the clothes of the wolf, the sheep overruling the wolf through black metal alone, whereas it was black metal that was supposed to give the power back to the wolves.
And yet, look at it. Look at your "black metal". It has become the music of yesterday, of the trends. Of the people who care not for the judgement of Satan tomorrow, but for the judgement of the masses today.
I spit on black metal.
Dark Thrones and Black Flags score: 76/100.
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