Retard Metal Alert! - "At the Heart of Winter" Review (3%)
If black metal bands were required to have ingredient labels, Immortal's would read "100% feces". Immortal finally hang the towel on their crowd-pandering metalcore days of Blizzard Beasts to make room for the musical ornamentation and forms that bands utilise when they want to make it to the mainstream quarters of Dimmu Burger shit metal. "Emotional" vocals more befitting screamo and alt-rock bands croon and drone over listless nu-groove metal that has more in common with Slipknot and Pantera than with anything from Darkthrone or Phantom.
While the albums before sounded like commercial Wacken pandering, At the Heart of Winter sounds like something that Roadrunner would have released in the late 90s - Korn meets Watain meets Papa Roach, quite the homosexual orgy (how befitting of Immortal). With so many people using Enthrone Darkness Triumphant as a template for manufacturing artistically-bankrupt and stylistically-void "extreme" muzak, something different but just as stupid needed to be tested within the crucible over at Osmose's headquarters in order to compete with the commercial turdfest of Nuclear Blast (label on which Immortal would eventually sign, how befitting once again). The result is more worthless music that sounds like it could be Linkin Park, Incubus, or any of those other MTV bands you hear on the radio.
It would only go even further and faster downhill after that, with Damned in Black and Sons of Northern Darkness seeing Immortal compete with literally Gorgoroth for the dregs of the dregs, the shitstains in the gutter, the absolute bottom of the barrel of retarded "beer metallers" that give every metalhead a bad name.
Many metalheads look at bands like Immortal and ask themselves: who buys this? I mean, even if you DO actually manage to enjoy the "music" without having ingested hepatic steatosis inducing levels of alcohol, isn't it pretty obvious that Immortal's two clowns Abbath and Demonaz are openly and deliberately mocking their own moronic audience? Well, considering Immortal's fans are literally retarded - the dumbest people in heavy metal - I think we all know the answer by now.
Retard Metal Alert!
Immortal, you suck. Abbath and Demonaz, repeat after me: Linkin Park trying to play RAC is not black metal. And stop trying to be "true black metal warriors", you are only embarrassing yourselves.
For all their posing as "homophobic" warriors against the "twink elite" of Gaahl and Satyr, just notice the outright homoeroticism. These clownish posers literally pose, for every single one of their third-rate metalcore albums, in faux-Norse attire (that's absolutely anti-historical, for the record). Is it a surprise Abbath ended up fucking a marrying Demonaz' own sister? Why is it that it's ALWAYS those who obsess the most over deviant sexuality (Ahriman, Erik Danielsson, Richard Lederer), or make up "salacious" rumours about other black metal artists (Roger "Inferanus" Tiegs, Harald "Demonaz" Nævdal) that are found guilty of the most improbable and hypocritical cuckoldry? Between the male escort "Lord"/"Lady" Ahriman, the ex-homosexual pornographer Erik Danielsson and Infernus (you know why he's infamous, the diaper thing), is it really a surprise that all three have written extensive Facebook posts in which they decry the infiltration of black metal by "homosexual pagans"? I'm starting to see a pattern, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Also notice also the cult like figures they - Infernus, Demonaz, Danielsson, Ahriman - make themselves out to be. Kevin MacDonald describes this as the "guru effect" and it's a very Jewish thing. Jews have tended to forms cults around charismatic rabbis, and secular versions of Judaism do the same around secular rabbis like Freud and Noam Chomsky. Demonaz is a secular rabbi, the "Troll King" of black metal. Of course it's all tongue in cheek. Of course it's "humour". But that is the point. They want to hijack the "black metal" label, stamp a pink dildo on it - or, in the case of Demonaz, a literal buttplug that he shares with Abbath and his sister at their swinger parties - and turn the entire genre into a joke by association.
Avoid this mallcore shit, and prefer Burzum's Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, Darkthrone's Under a Funeral Moon (two bands whose members have been relentlessly targeted by Demonaz' Facebook defamation) or even Phantom's The Epilogue To Sanity. Almost anything is better than Immortal, and certainly more honest.
At the Heart of Winter score: 3/100.
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