Overrated Beyond Belief - "The Somberlain" Review (7%)
Is Dissection an overrated fake metal band or what ?
The Somberlain certainly has it all : bad riffs, no atmosphere, weak musicianship, horrid vocals, cheesy MTV melodies... seriously, what is this ?
Despite all the posing and posturing the band Dissection engages in (and revels in), The Somberlain is simply not black metal.
It's at best a weak mixture of Dino Burger, Emperor, Summoning, Craple of Filth and Satyrlolicon, yet somehow managing to be even worse than all those shit bands taken individually.
The fact that the band calls itself "orchestral melodic black metal" makes this entire album even more ridiculous. You are either black metal or you are not, and clearly Dissection is not.
The Somberlain is not about music, it's about a gimmick. The band Dissection is trying very hard to appear "satanic" and "part of the scene" ("LUK AT US WE R HEAVY LULZ 4 SATAN !!!"), but unfortunately they don't try very hard to produce good music.
In fact you could make the argument that the band Dissection itself, in all of its pathetic existence, is a gimmick. I see nothing in this record, or in the rest of their discography for that matter, that isn't explicitely marketed to impressionable twelve year old kids that hate their parents (and true metal).
The Somberlain is the perfect case of fake commercial crap parading as black metal.
Overrated Beyond Belief
The Somberlain is utter crap.
Sorry, did I offend ? Let me try again without the profanity...
The Somberlain is PURE DIARRHEA that smells so bad that no one could ever get close enough to FLUSH THE FUCKING TOILET.
I could use as much vulgarities as I want, I couldn't possibly be as offensive to you as this pathetic commercial garbage is to true black metal. The Somberlain is an insult to the entire black metal genre.
The Somberlain sounds like someone decided to combine all the rejected material from the most untalented bands and compile it into an album. It's boring, cheesy, plastic and retardedly unoriginal.
Now it's no crime to not be original in metal. But when you call yourself "orchestral melodic black metal" and you can't even play any instrument correctly, when all you can produce is a boring album in which every song sounds the same and every riff or chorus is immediately forgotten after a listen, then perhaps the hate is deserved.
Who actually enjoys a turd album like this ? People who have never heard metal in their lives ? Posers who only care about looking "satanic" ? What makes someone even consider that The Somberlain belongs anywhere else than in a particularly insalubrious public restroom ? The cover art ? The song title ? The lyrics ? It can't even be that, they're all rubbish too !
To sum up the instrumental performance : uninspired, boring, generic, mallcorish. Playing quality untechnical music is far from impossible if you've got the songwriting abilities to make up for it. Dissection doesn't, and that's why The Somberlain fails (amongst other obvious reasons).
I'm not even going to describe individual tracks since they all seem to blend in each other in a sea of adulterated fecal matter. They pretty much all follow the same boring pattern : weak vocals that never change, unmemorable guitar riffs, cheap Mario-esque keyboard interlude that add nothing to the songs, untalented drumming hidden somewhere in the production, disjointed songs that make it hard to tell where one starts and the other stops and constantly hoping the song (whichever it is) is about to end...
There are no less than three instrumental "keyboard only" tracks, and even there they somehow manage to make them all sound the same while being as utterly unmemorable as the rest.
There are no highlights, there is no atmosphere, there is no point bothering with song titles and there is no point bothering with listening to this. Skip The Somberlain entirely. If you already own it, skip the tracks, all of them.
And Dissection, please flush the toilet next time you make a "Somberlain"...
The Somberlain score: 7/100.
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