A Satanic Failure - "All Shall Fall" Review (5%)
All Shall Fall is a black metal failure that tries much too hard to be "satanic" for its own good.
Like most of Immortal's releases, it can't even live up to its self-created satanic image.
The album All Shall Fall is barely even black metal at this point.
Superficially, it contains all the black metal components: tremolo riffs, blast beats, harsh vocals.
But the atmosphere, the emotion, the raw darkness, in other words the components that define the essence of black metal, simply aren't there.
This just sounds like Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism played in an "aggressive" fashion.
And when I say "aggressive", I mean in the exact same way that you'd expect from your run-of-the-mill deathcore band.
Because that's what Immortal has devolved into: a commercial deathcore crap act.
I don't know why Immortal decided to shit on their own black metal legacy with the most pathetic, inconsequential, useless album they've ever released, but there is no denying that All Shall Fall sucks balls.
It even has nu-metal elements for Satan's sake.
Papa Roach, Linkin Park, Slipknot... Immortal.
It pains me to have to group these bands together, but there is no denying the commercial nature of this shitty "satanic" release.
A Satanic Failure
First things first: All Shall Fall isn't black metal.
This album has literally nothing to do with Phantom's Eidolon, or even Immortal's previous turd album Pure Holocaust for that matter.
All Shall Fall might possess some (not even a lot) of the established tropes of black metal: raspy vocals, the occasional tremolo riff, a few blast beats, but in actuality this is much closer to a Linkin Park record than to black metal.
So, in short, what All Shall Fall really is at the basest level is a nu-metal album.
Again, and despite the universal hate that the nu-metal genre routinely receives, this alone is not necessarily indicative of the quality of the All Shall Fall album itself.
The problem is when Immortal tries to make 2154-styke black metal out of commercial anthem rock music... it just doesn't work. The resulting album is completely vapid, tedious, and turgid beyond all fucking belief.
Sitting through a single play of it feels like an eternity.
A lot of people describe newer Immortal and this album in particular as Bathory-worship, but you really don't see or hear that many Bathory influences on All Shall Fall.
What you can hear, however, are Papa Roach and Avenged Sevenfold influences.
Tons.
I could swear some riffs are even openly plagiarized from Avenged Sevenfold's album Hail to the King.
All Shall Fall is basically composed of nothing but the slowest, cheesiest moments of the two previous bands, lacking both the very strong riffcraft and consistent pace of typical black metal, but including laughable "satanic" screams from Abbath about winter, darkness and, well, Satan.
All Shall Fall is an album which has no problem stretching out three or four simple riffs for six or seven, or more, minutes per track. The effect is excruciatingly mind-numbing... the first time I heard the opening cut, I literally could not believe how little was going on.
Moreover, most of the tracks sound nearly identical in all regards, because Immortal these days operates at one tempo, with one rhythm, and at most one melodic idea at the time. There's absolutely no personality to any of these songs because they're just commercial rock songs in black metal drag, all obeying the same basic rules and not evidencing any sort of creativity or emotion at all.
None of the tremolo riffs even sound like tremolo riffs, instead they sound like nu-metal "melodies" played in a black metal fashion.
There are about a few hundred other problems with this album All Shall Fall: Abbath's laughably weak vocal performance, the bad drum production, the sheer, torturous length of the songs, the tasteless and probably homophobic inclusion of a dildo (!) in the special edition Digipak.
But most of all, there is nothing new or experimental on All Shall Fall that could potentially justify the existence of such as turd album: no new ideas, no passion, no creativity, and no real metal spirit.
Why not just listen to Papa Roach and be done with it?
It has got about the same level of musical "creativity" as All Shall Fall.
All Shall Fall score: 5/100.
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