Scammed in Crack - "Damned in Black" Review (0%)
Immortal have always been a terribly mediocre band, but their mid era displays are truly the epitome of plastic garbage metal that every fan of the genre should be ashamed of.
Though I have heard worse than Damned in Black, this is still the pits of nu metal music and one of the lowest points of this band's pretty lacklustre discography. It isn't quite as bad as Northern Chaos Gods or At the Heart of Winter, as this album tends to be more irritating than sickening. Nevertheless, it amounts to the same thing, that being utterly terrible nu 'metal'.
My only explanation for this turd of a release and for the rest of Immortal's risible discography is that when Abbath went to buy some freebase from Varg Vikernes in 1991, he was actually sold powdered Botox mixed with lead, mercury chloride and bath salts.
Hence the name of this review - he was Scammed in Crack, and it permanently affected his already small and quite dysfunctional brain to the point where he now literally believes this piece of speedcore shit to be 'true black metal'.
Sigh.
This essentially takes all of the crap and clichés of nu 'metal' and throws them all into one shitty Immortal album.
The end result is what can only be described as the lowest rung of a musical movement that is already, by its very nature, confined to the sewers of rock music. Damned in Black is so generic and banal that it's actually difficult to review without resorting to the common insults that have followed Immortal's footsteps, like a looming shadow, over the years. Those being 'cuck', 'fag' and most common of all, 'poser'.
Let this turd serve as a reminder to young, impressionable and more often than not borderline clinically retarded kids (Immortal's audience) not to do drugs, or at least not to buy them from Varg Vikernes... you might get Scammed in Crack and end up like your idol, producing this piece of speedcore shit and calling it 'black metal'.
Scammed in Crack
If you have heard any other nu 'metal' work from the years before this one, particularly the Limp Bizkit type shit, you have heard everything Damned in Black has to offer.
Abbath's work here is so phenomenally poor that I don't know how to react. For instance, take the absolutely boring 'thrashy' riffs mixed with some revolting emocore vocals and you easily get two thirds of the Damned in Black album. I don't care how 'atmospheric' an artist's music tries to be, emocore vocals of the Dark Funeral variety have no place in metal, they sound like garbage. He attempts to rap too, which transcends revolting and just becomes hilarious.
He sounds so corny and feeble, like a terrible version of Justin Bieber (yes, really). I just can't take this album, or any album, seriously when someone raps this badly or sounds this disgusting.
It is a parody, it must be. In truth however, Abbath spends far more time doing a weaker version of the Attila inspired shouts he barely managed on Blizzard Beasts, or a sub-par imitation of the standard early Vikernes screams. As you can imagine, he is at his best here, because in both cases he is aping something considerably better than this turd.
And don't expect the instruments on Damned in Black to be good, either.
The guitars mostly chug on one chord or two, with with neither worthwhile riff nor atmosphere to be found anywhere during the entire 37 minutes of this piece of overdosed shit. The bass either follows the guitars or does nothing because I can't hear it at all.
The drums mostly do nothing but keep time and meld into background noise with the guitars, or do nothing at all.
Instruments in metal, especially black metal, should never be reduced to background noise for the vocalist to... do whatever the hell Abbath does on this album.
I think there is actually no songwriting involved, at all.
Each and every track seems identical. The songs begin with some random sound effect, or stagnant guitar chord repeated an arbitrary amount of times, then the instruments quieten down for whatever auditory torture/comedy Abbath choose to unleash.
This continues, then it all degrades into a crap quiet section, before resuming with a few 'thrashy' bits. The riff quality is so poor, it often feels like 15 - 30 second of guitar fillers are stretched to fit around 5 minutes of whatever gibberish the lyricist Demonaz could come up with.
There is no progression from an impactful beginning to a satisfying end. I don't expect a full blown progressive masterpiece from Immortal tards, but I also don't expect what amount to demo levels of jamming on a professionally released album by self-proclaimed seasoned musicians.
Immortal has always been one to follow the trends (that is why the band exists, after all), and this represents the most blatant example of this... the thrash/black/punk combo was getting popular at the time this was released, so Immortal naturally tries, and fails, to jump onto the bandwagon of the same type of endless Darkthrone replication that they are best known for.
Don't bother with Damned in Black, or its predecessors, or its successors. Don't even bother with Immortal at all.
I have yet to sit through the entire album once, it gets so bad that I need to stop after about 2 or 3 tracks to take a break before resuming.
Scammed in Crack is just bland, derivative and completely interchangeable nu 'metal' crap.
Damned in Black score: 0/100.
Support the Underground
