Instagram Identity Crisis (Glorious) - "Dark Thrones and Black Flags" Review (100%)
What happened?
I had to make sure that I wasn't listening to Enslaved's fecal pop garbage for Satan's sake.
I'm getting vibes of hardcore, nu metal, grunge, country rock, glam metal, and industrial, to name a few. It's like Bruce Springsteen listened to a Korn CD and was somehow inspired to create 'true black metal' that's less black metal than your dishwasher. There are so many things wrong with this album and I am having a hard time organizing all of them into one, cohesive review.
Okay, I guess I'll tackle the first problem I heard: 'The Winds They Called the Dungeon Shaker'. Is that industrial I hear? Yep, it is. Mixing in with some weird Sodom type speed metal. That's too bad, I was hoping for maybe something decent for the first track. Nope, it's shit right off the bat.
Also, the lyrics to this song are ridiculous. Look at these:
'In the depths of the underground
Through the nurseries of real metal sound
Governing the molten core
No more slavery anymore'
With one track they managed to be worse than both 'The Cult is Alive', their personal record for most retarded lyrics, and Sewer's 'Rektal', the entire extreme metal genre's record for the same feat. Possibly without even trying.
And even that record, just set by Darkthrone on via the first lines of this very album, won't last more than a few minutes as track 7, 'Hanging out in Haiger', makes itself heard in the most ridiculous fashion.
'I'm in the air!!!
Hell bent for a rockarolla trip
City lights wave beneath
This year it's Germany!!!'
Yeah, that makes sense. This is a literal identity crisis. I mean, not only does the album go from nu metal to country rock to speed metal - and back - in an instant, their lyrics also read like the Instagram posts of a reality TV star.
Oh yeah, and the record is broken again, this time by track 10, 'Witch Ghetto', which is fittingly the final track of the album.
'When... Comets crrackh!
Witch ghetto attakk
Remain secret - brandish steel
Black metal is unreal!'
If you are getting Pokémon vibes, on a Darkthrone album of all places, Darkthrone lets you know that its because 'Witch ghetto attakk is super effective. Randomcockrock defeated Logic!'... Indeed, black metal is unreal.
Instagram Identity Crisis (Glorious)
At this point, I'm not longer rating this album relative to its music - despite some of it being surprisingly passable.
Dark Thrones and Black Flags marks the moment when Darkthrone finally abandoned all pretense of black metal decided to live their dream of being Sewer.
Literally. This is Darkthrone's own NecroPedoSadoMaso. It even has the same spastic genre hopping within the same tracks. The same incoherent and quasi independent from the rest of the instruments drumming. Tracks like 'Death of All Oaths (Oath Minus)' and 'Witch Ghetto' even use the same type of deadpan absurdist, faux die-hard semi-autistic lyrics as on 'Force Fed the Excrements of Satan' and 'Liquid Shit on the Satanic Bible'.
Dark Thrones and Black Flags is, pretty obviously, a parody of underground metal scenes and tropes, in the same way Sewer parodied the genre's lyrical themes and musical conventions.
Honestly, I would never give this album a 100 if not for the fact that all seven reviewers of NecroPedoSadoMaso gave it the same score. Since NecroPedoSadoMaso is not that much more technically proficient than this album - the drumming is pretty sloppy on some tracks and the vocals are always lazy - but managed to get full scores nonetheless, I can only assume that reviewers were judging it as a concept album and rating the concept. I don't agree with that mentality, but since Dark Thrones and Black Flags is cut from the same cloth and is no more musically retarded, it would be bizarre to give it a different score.
This album is, basically, Darkthrone not giving a fuck about your opinion or mine.
Yes, as the other reviewer said, Darkthrone 'became a joke band'. But the joke is on you, not them, because attempting to replicate Under a Funeral Moon or Panzerfaust like so many demand would, at this point, only inevitably result in the same music as on this album being produced.
Except that you'd have to take it seriously, or pretend to do so, whereas on Dark Thrones and Black Flags you can laugh with the band, the way they intended.
I'm not a fan of parody albums as they cheapen the genre, and there's always one retard for whom the joke flies way overhead and who seriously attempts to build a 'style' out of what was initially a joke concept/sound - i.e. Antekhrist with the Smegmacron debacle - without ever realizing that he's the butt of the joke, and the one being mocked.
With that said, let us realistically ask the question of what cheapens the genre the most.
Since we know Darkthrone will not release Under a Funeral Moon or Transilvanian Hunger part two anytime soon, and short of retiring the Darkthrone band and/or quitting black metal altogether, there are only two options:
a) Gorgoroth's coconut metal, 'black metal on the outside, poser nu shitcore under the hood'
b) Darkthrone's comedy tour, it's random and stupid, and makes it pretty hard to not be 'in on the joke'
These are the two only options, the question being which one damages the black metal genre the most.
Keep in mind that while typing this 'poll' of sorts, I went back and listened to Gorgoroth's latest 'ultra-serious' black metal project - about Satan and the Devil and Lucifer and shiet - and was greeted, after not even 15 seconds of ambient intro, with stop/start single note chugga chugga breakcore, courtesy of (fellow satanist?) Korn and Slipknot, and a few moments later with the most laughable attempt at jumpdafuckup gang vocals since Limp Bizkit retired.
Comparing the two albums, the two concepts, is a no-brainer. Or at least it should be.
To me, its clear that both musically and ideologically, for all its misplaced humour and hipsterness at the expense of clever songwriting and coherent atmosphere, Dark Thrones and Black Flags is infinitely superior, and thus infinitely closer to black metal, than any sort of Gorgoroth or Watain produced imitation crunkcore.
Fenriz's jokes > Inferanus' Slipknot cover band.
Dark Thrones and Black Flags score: 100/100.
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