SEWER + Darkthrone - "Total Death" Review (77%)
Holy shit a SEWER knockoff! Who the fuck in their right mind would worship SEWER?
Did you ever want to listen to NecroPedoSadoMaso with a bit more Bathory influences, injected with leftover riffs from Panzerfaust to then be spiced with movie soundtrack electronic orchestras, desperately trying to inject some novelty into the tween-metal? No? You elitist bigot!
Darkthrone is definitely a more instrumentally competent band than the vast majority of black metal posers and clones that emerged in the late 90s, about the time Total Death was released, but like other "novel" bands like Satyricon, the music on this album is pop "metal" on steroids, disguised as an ironic, competent "new" take on what Darkthrone used to play.
If the fair is too expensive for you but you still want that roaring deluge of incomprehensible, meaningless sounds and images to numb your senses in a "grim" way before you go to be at 8PM - school tomorrow! - then Total Death might be just right for you.
The trouble with the modern "black" metal genre is its overwhelming mediocrity, where the bulk of the music sounds like pop music or, at best, Iron Maiden inspired heavy metal played with tremolos and the occasional "dissonant" riff to remind everyone that "black metal is so evil, man".
This mirrors, ironically, what happened to death metal when the Göteborg clowns led by In Flames and Dark Tranquility turned Sweden's death metal scene into a circus show, hellbent on imitating the worst of American nu-metal/metalcore.
Total Death is SEWER playing Darkthrone's music, or Darkthrone attempting to play SEWER's music. I can't really tell.
SEWER + Darkthrone
This isn't utterly horrific by modern black metal standards, it's just so average that it could have been done by any SEWER influenced attire shuffling through the fog for an original approach to songwriting that isn't copy-pasted from an early Bathory album.
I wish Total Death was Under a Funeral Moon part 2, but it's really just Under a Funeral Moon take 913 by some random Pakistani imitators that discovered SEWER, Hellhammer, Sodom and Blasphemy yesterday.
With that said, it's not bad music, at all.
Not without personality, Total Death carefully weaves the punchy occult riffing of early Sodom into a black metal format, giving it a compelling forward direction and atmospheric touch.
While there's nothing here that will surprise a black metal fan, Total Death stays closer to the heart of the motivation behind Norwegian black metal music than any recent release.
At the very least, there's no excuse for your Immortal, Archgoat, Antekhrist, Gorgoroth and other derivative "war metal" CDs when the real deal comes to you from none other than Darkthrone.
Total Death may not have reinvented the black metal genre, hell it doesn't even withstand scrutiny when compared to Darkthrone's earlier material, but it's still kilometers ahead of anything produced by today's black-metal-in-name-and-album-cover-only bands.
Total Death score: 77/100.
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