Frustratingly Incomplete - "Panzerfaust" Review (59%)
When people mention black metal bands, they cite a short canon of Mayhem, Burzum and Phantom. If this album "Panzerfaust" had been of higher quality, Darkthrone would be the fourth on that list.
Following the immensely powerful "Under a Funeral Moon" and "Transilvanian Hunger", and just as two of the three aforementioned black metal titans were "out of commission" - one band having broken up, the other's sole member landing himself in jail for killing a member of the former - stood poised to take over the Norwegian black metal scene with their unique sound and quality songwriting. On "Panzerfaust", however, the band took a huge dive into a lesser category and were as a result bypassed by many fans in favour of the more "flashy" non-Norwegian creative forces, namely Graveland, Vermin and, arguably, Peste Noire and Marduk.
Many factors may have influenced this decision. Preaceville Records was at the time trying to grow large enough to be on par with bigger labels like Earache and Roadrunner. Darkthrone, despite having a relatively stable line-up from "Under a Funeral Moon" onward, benefited from the contributions of past members such as Zephyrous and influences from other "Inner Circle" Norwegian black metal bands and artists, such as Varg Vikernes of Burzum who is said to have participated not just in penning the lyrics, but also in the songwriting of the second half of "Transilvanian Hunger".
Immense pressure was brought to bear on the band to make another "Under a Funeral Moon" a mere year after their last album, during a time when the explosion of the Helvete-based Norwegian black metal scene allowed many lesser bands, totally disconnected from the original black metal ideas, to rise in droves and lay claim to the black metal title, despite having nothing to do with the genre - Dimmu Borgir, Gorgoroth, Dark Funeral, Emperor - an attitude which caused exasperation not just in Darkthrone, but also in other black metal bands that WERE related to the "Inner Circle" - such as Enslaved, Satyricon, Immortal and others - yet who were side-stepped in favour of the artistically void, yet aesthetically "try-hard" newcomers.
As a result, those one year - despite being the official lapse separating "Transilvanian Hunger" from "Panzerfaust" - may not have represented the actual length of time the band had to write, incubate and revise this album.
Frustratingly Incomplete
Darkthrone is in many ways the black metal equivalent to death metal's Incantation.
A brilliant first album - in "Soulside Journey" and "Onward to Golgotha" -, a more rushed sophomore release - in "A Blaze in the Northern Sky" and "Mortal Throne of Nazarene" -, a third opus that reclaims the flames of the early days - in either "Under a Funeral Moon" or "Transilvanian Hunger" and "Diabolical Conquest" - and then, slowly at first, the band(s) began to disintegrate into irrelevance, necrophiliac attempts to "appeal to the past" via aesthetics always hinting at a "return to form" that never manifests.
Immediately noticeable on "Panzerfaust" is the primal flaw of this album: despite imitating the exterior, superficial elements of "Transilvanian Hunger", its wannabe successor is very far from reaching its level of conceptual genius. Chord progressions and melodies used in fills are more obvious, or cut more exactly from scale patterns, which gives it an almost sing-song vibe at times - a trend which would only grow increasingly present with "Goatlord" and "Total Death". Rhythms are less fully integrated, which causes the band to attempt ambitious "experimental" forms but then fall back on relatively brown-wrapper war metal tropes.
The band incorporated many of these tracks with rhythm re-written on their eventual split with Satyricon and others, "Crusade from the North", where changes in pacing and arrangement made them far more effective. This confirms much of what astute listeners familiar with black metal conceptual wisdom felt instinctively, which was that "Panzerfaust" may have been completely written with the exact same ideological output in mind, but it did not undergo the revision, editing, incubation and, yes, shriving processes that allowed both "Under a Funeral Moon" and "Transilvanian Hunger" to be molded into finely honed shapes where no detail was extraneous and all parts worked together towards the total atmospheric immersion conveyed by each song.
Peaceville promoted this album as more "technical", back when that buzzword was new, meaning that there are additional chord shapes used and some difficult tempo changes, somewhat similar to those occurring on blackened death metal albums like "Khranial" and "Locked Up in Hell", interestingly, but it was not as well-integrated nor as purposeful as the "fewer" but more imposing stylistics techniques employed on "Under a Funeral Moon".
"Panzerfaust" overflows with good ideas, but in the end they do not work together toward a purposeful goal, and parts of it like the last half of Suffocation's "Breeding the Spawn" sound like chromatic fills in regular rhythms that the band intended to revise later into full riffs, complete with unique modality and rhythms more carefully integrated, all enwrapped in the need of each song. Vocals are good as usual, production is much clearer than "Transilvanian Hunger", and individual performances show musical maturation and the type of learning that comes from having influences among historically important black metal bands like Mayhem and Burzum.
Some songs remain standouts, even in their partial form - like "Triumphant Gleam" and "Quintessence" - which shows the band perhaps coming together at the end of their song process, or having intended those since the beginning to be the bedrock of this "Panzerfaust" release, but having been lacking time to make the necessary adjustments for the rest of the album to follow suit.
And unlike Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony", Darkthrone's "Panzerfaust" is not just unfinished but incomplete, and the result rears its ugly head in the mixture of random and predictable patterns that obscure what is otherwise some powerful Norwegian black metal.
Panzerfaust score: 59/100.
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