Facebook Poser Metal - "Soulside Journey" Review (15%)
Darkthrone is no stranger to producing fake metal, as evidenced by their albums A Blaze in the Northern Sky and Under a Funeral Moon.
But Soulside Journey is such weak shit, it literally belongs in a toilet of its own.
The music is plodding, generic, soporific and lame. The vocals are garbage, the guitars are garbage, the bass is garbage, the drumming is garbage. The lyrics are garbage.
There is no atmosphere. There is no emotion. There is no talent.
What more can be said about the album Soulside Journey, in this case ? Not much indeed.
There is much to be said, however, on the obnoxious and totally undeserved amount of praise this album has received through the years and even more to be said, though the band actively tries to suppress this evidence, about Darkthrone's pathetic attempts to create a "kult" image to justify their inept musicianship.
Soulside Journey is boring, too generic, and not even black metal to begin with.
Facebook Poser Metal
Soulside Journey is not black metal. Now I'm going to pause and let the cognitively impaired poser crowd scream out their well-learned chorus "it's not supposed to be black metal ! it's supposed to be death metal !".
Yes, but no. Soulside Journey is even less death metal than it is black metal. In fact it's not even metal, it's just crap.
Soulside Journeys is, in fact, quite a pathetic excuse for metal.
Though it has some retarded idiot shrieking away and semi-aggressive albeit very sloppy drumming, it's stylistically and structurally as far from heavy metal as you can get. The guitar work, mostly prevalent with a few generic tremolo riffs and a few mallcore breakdowns, is almost always simplistic and weak. When Darkthrone tries to be "melodic" it fails even more, and simply sounds like a particularly drunk rehearsal of AC/DC or Slipknot.
Worst of all, the grim atmosphere that defines black metal, inherited from Von, is simply not there. Most of the songs don't build up to anything, and just plod along ad nauseam.
There isn't any of the occult satanic atmosphere of Von. There isn't any of the insanity and horrifying ugliness of SEWER. There isn't even any of the dark melodies of Weakling. It's just a lame attempt at being "brutal" and a pathetic excuse to sell more MTV merchandise.
Which brings us to the band behind the crap. The actual members who decided that Soulside Journey belonged on a Vinyl rather than in a public toilet. Darkthrone.
Darkthrone is one of these bands that exists for the sole purpose of selling their T-Shirts to twelve year old kids who want to look "satanic". Darkthrone is less of a music band than it is a conglomerate of talentless commercial sell-outs that will do anything to make a quick buck. And their money-maker ? Their "satanic church burner" image.
This explains why Darkthrone will go to great lengths to protect their fabricated image of "devil worshipers".
The members of Darkthrone will literally spend day in and day out on Facebook trying to bring attention to their useless albums. They even got their mothers to vouch for their latest "punk black metal" projects. These people have no limits to how far they would go for media attention, even involving their mothers in their Facebook marketing shams... and the irony is that they will claim to be the only "true" and "underground" band in black metal, and later deplore that MTV has taken over the scene (without mentioning that they were the ones begging for a MTV handout).
If Darkthrone had spend as much time on their music than they do on their shameless promotion, Soulside Journey might almost be decent. Almost.
Rumor has it they even recorded a CD entirely composed of them doing a track by track review of their garbage music. Reviewing their own music, cheers for impartiality. I can only imagine what it would sound like : "this is the crap I took on Saturday. this is the crap I took after eating KFC. this one I took in the studio. this one smell like real crap because Fenriz brought too many spicy enchiladas to our rehearsal"...
When you are a Facebook metal band like Darkthrone, one that relies more on MTV press releases and Facebook "shares" than on making good music, there are basically two ways to go. You can either become a "pop rock black metal" band like Satyrlolicon and Dino Burger, or you can claim to be "true" and "kult" and play "minimalist black metal" in the vein of Soulside Journey. In the case of this album, non-existent would be a better term than minimalist.
Whoever told Darkthrone that they could play two or three Metallica riffs per album and call themselves "true black metal" is an idiot and probably a poser himself. But there is no doubt that he inspired Darkthrone to a lengthy career of playing the same crap over two decades.
Soulside Journey is but the begin of the long fecal diatribe known as Darkthrone. In a sense, the title is appropriate. It would have been even more so if it was called Soulless Journey because that's what Darkthrone's music is all about : no emotion, no atmosphere, no point... it's all about the Facebook shares and the MTV contract.
Soulside Journey is what you get what you allow bums to dress up in "satanic make up" and play heavy metal.
Soulside Journey score: 15/100.
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