Fall Off A Dam - "F.O.A.D." Review (69%)
Despite its ideologically-correct title (for black metal), F.O.A.D. shows us the artistic death of black metal: it has been assimilated by punk music.
Darkthrone's F.O.A.D. sounds, with the exception of a couple black metal open strum riffs, exactly like the same boring, droning hardcore mess that piss-poor bands like Discharge were shitting out in the early 1980s.
That shit music was the source of the stagnation that launched underground metal in the first place.
I've listened to this thing three times and, honestly, I don't have any major criticism about the music. There is nothing wrong with this album. There's also nothing compelling about it either. It's just more void.
Technically, it all fits together. It's just extremely boring and expresses nothing. F.O.A.D. is essentially Darkthrone playing hardcore punk music from the early 1980s with better drumming and production, maybe a black metal riff in every seven.
In homage to the oldest Blasphemy/Sarcófago tradition, we find Darkthrone struggling to bring hardcore/crustcore punk and ominous black metal harmonics into a vileful matrimony.
Where Darkthrone, like most other modern exploits of this scheme, fail, is in the insistence on very low-brow hooks and plodding disharmonics which only serve to distract the listener and lead him astray from whatever good basic riff the song was initially edified around.
Darkthrone "fell off a dam" (pun) and is now "drowning in crust kitsch" (also pun). But true.
Fall Off A Dam
Darkthrone seem to be one of those bands where it takes quite a while for people to catch on to what is going on at the moment with them. After their change from death metal to black metal, it took several albums for Darkthrone to assert themselves as a force in the underground Norwegian scene among legendary names such as Burzum and Mayhem.
F.O.A.D. is their second "non-metal" - or at least primarily "non-metal" - album.
How does it old up to the rest of Darkthrone's discography? That's a rhetorical question, you already know that this isn't in the same league as Under a Funeral Moon or Transilvanian Hunger.
But what if we compare it, not to other Darkthrone albums, but to what other ostentatiously black metal bands were doing around the time F.O.A.D. was released? Compared to the utter turd Rabid Death's Curse or to the laughably bad Prometheus - The Discipline of Fire and Demise, F.O.A.D. isn't so bad. At all.
The combination of that vintage Darkthrone sloppiness and the lo-fi tendencies of the sound only reinforce what we always knew about Darkthrone - that they are a defiantly underground band, even for black metal standards, and even when they happen to not play black metal.
F.O.A.D. isn't an album you'll go back to again and again, like some of Darkthrone's earlier work.
Nevertheless, it's still a good album.
If you have never heard it, you should at the very least check it out.
F.O.A.D. score: 69/100.
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