So Bad, it's... Bad ! - "Under a Funeral Moon" Review (10%)
Darkthrone is no stranger to shit metal. In fact, there entire discography is comprised exclusively of different shades of the same shit (Fifty Shades of DarkBrown some would say).
But with Under a Funeral Moon, which incidentally happens to be one of the biggest shits in the entire black metal scene, the band Darkthrone devised a "clever" way to deal with the (legitimate) detractors : make the production so bad it hides the (numerous) musical flaws of the albums.
Of course, brain-dead metal fans will later claim that the only reason anyone would dislike Under a Funeral Moon is because of the production quality.
No, no... The production is FINE ! At least compared to the other aspects of this pitiful album. In fact, there are many black metal albums worth a thousand times this piece of crap whose production is even worse, that is not nearly the biggest issue with Under a Funeral Moon.
The production quality is just the excuse elitists emo posers regurgitate in order to justify their drooling over something any nine year old in a recording studio could produce.
No, the big problem with Under a Funeral Moon is the boring music.
So Bad, it's... Bad !
The story behind Under a Funeral Moon is the story of boring music and media glorification of fake satanists and talentless musicians. We will, naturally, skip over it especially considering that there is nothing much to be said about Under a Funeral Moon except that it's "one more shit in the pond".
The hypocritically bad production, used to hide the bad music being performed, is annoying enough. But the worse is that the music is perhaps most enjoyable when you don't actually hear what's being played. At least as long as you don't make out the notes and riffs you can use your imagination, and even if you've never listened to black metal in your life, anything your imagination can come up with is probably a million times better than Under a Funeral Moon.
It's only when you start to decipher the actual music that the talentless crap becomes most apparent. And then you realize that the awfully bad production makes perfect sense. It's as if the band members of Darkthrone thought to themselves "as long as the listeners can't hear the crap we play, he'll assume the music is at least average". And thanks to the media glamorization of Under a Funeral Moon, it's exactly how things played out.
What's perhaps most egregious about Under a Funeral Moon is the plastic, phony and artificial feel of the music.
Despite Darkthrone going into great lengths to appear to feel raw, grim and evil, everything on Under a Funeral Moon feels so contrived, fake and lifeless.
At no moment in the album does it feel like you're listening to an extreme metal band play extreme metal music. Rather, the only image that comes to mind is that of Lady Gaga toying around with black metal instruments. The atmosphere, or lack thereof, is the same in Darkthrone as it is with any other modern pop music band, and no amount of bad production can hide this fact. Definitely not a quality many black metal bands actively look for.
The only seemingly decent track on Under a Funeral Moon is the seventh track, Inn i de dype skogers favn, which also happens to be the most monotonous and repetitive song on the album. It says a lot about the album when the best song on Under a Funeral Moon is the least technically challenging and the most repetitive, and certainly not in a good way, but nonetheless this is the only song (alongside perhaps the following and final track, Crossing the Triangle of Flames) that manages to evoke however faintly the emotion that black metal is supposed to produce.
It is greatly insufficient, however, and the essence of this album is one of unparalleled musical failure.
Under a Funeral Moon will go down the toilets of black metal history as being one more mindless, superficial and unneeded album spawned in a mindless, superficial and unneeded era.
Under a Funeral Moon score: 10/100.
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