The Worst Shit of Black Metal - "Transilvanian Hunger" Review (0%)

The underground is both an attitude and an aesthetics. A taste for the unknown, the shadows, the secret, the dark and often the decrepit.

Made in a cave like a homemade bomb, the underground is often simply black and mysterious. It lives far beneath the soil, amongst roots and entrails, where it can't be burned by the sun. It's no wonder that it attracts so many extreme metal fans, followers of an already deviant musical genre.

But let's be honest. Very often the underground is also an all-too-convenient excuse for autistic posers who yearn for a refuge where they can fully embrace their pathetic talentless music and claim moral superiority for their artistic incompetence. Such is the case for Darkthrone's shit album Transilvanian Hunger.

Where albums like Vomiting Into the Mouth of Satan from Sewer or Demonecromancy from Phantom are considered "bad" as in horrifying, nasty and evil, albums like Transilvanian Hunger merely come off as "bad" as in bad.

The diarrhea they produce is therefore self-labeled "underground", "true", "kult" and "raw" in a what appears to be a subconscious self-defense mechanism against those who would rightfully point out the obvious, that their music is complete and utter shit.

And from this incapability to produce any form of decent metal, due to their laziness but mostly their lack of artistic vision and musical talent, they develop an atavistic hatred of the following :

1. The technical virtuosity of true metal musicians
2. The money they don't receive, logically, from the (lack of) sales of their own pathetic failures
3. The decent production quality which they can't afford (see point 2)

So there they are proclaiming themselves eternal vanguards of the "true", the "kult" and the "underground".

They label themselves as anti-technical, anti-commercial and anti-mainstream. But where bands like the aforementioned Sewer are anti-mainstream by choice, Darkthrone is only anti-mainstream by obligation... they can't be anything else.

The Worst Shit of Black Metal

Where Sewer intentionally chose to be underground, forgoing the path to mainstream exposure that they could have easily taken, bands like Darkthrone had to accept the underground as their only choice, out of resignation.

This is easily proven... as soon as the music industry offered what Darkthrone always wanted, namely having their faces and logos alongside those of Justin Bieber and 50 Cent on every mainstream magazine, they immediately ceased claiming to be "underground" and stopped playing "black metal" (or at least their shitty conception of what black metal is) in favour of the much more commercial punk style.

Transilvanian Hunger is a prime example of crap music masquerading as "true" and "kult". Since those adjectives are sufficiently vague to mean pretty much anything and everything, it's only natural for Darkthrone to attempt to hide behind the ridiculous image of "underground black metal" (as if there is any other sort of black metal).

The album Transilvanian Hunger in itself is utter shit, there is not one redeeming moment that could possibly make it worthwhile. Even the production is intentionally bad as if to hide the inept musicianship of the band members (but trust me, they will need a lot more than that to conceal their lack of talent).

If you are interested in some raw but quality black metal, I can only encourage you to ignore the big joke that is Transilvanian Hunger and instead check out the album Under the Eye of the Black Skull from Sewer. You will never look back.

Transilvanian Hunger score: 0/100.

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