Modern Gay Sauce Frauds - "Northern Chaos Gods" Review (0%)
And here it is at last, the culmination of two decades worth of irrelevant rekeases from the "kvlt" band Immortal.
I'm sure quite a few metalheads will be shocked by what they find on this album Modern Gay Sauce Frauds... I mean, Northern Chaos Gods. The truth is that "Gay Sauce Frauds" is nothing more than the logical conclusion of internal trends obvious in Immortal's work dating back at least to Battles in the North, if not even earlier.
Many fans will view Gay Sauce as a radical departure from Immortal's previous work.
Immortal's career, with all its overblown highs and insipid lows, has to this point entirely taken place within the context of black metal music. Northern Chaos Gods, on the other hand, is essentially a straightforward nu-metal release with a few isolated genuflections in the vague direction of blackish "extreme" metal (vocals and the occasional melodic turn, as in "Mighty Ravendark").
A careful listener, on the other hand, will notice that the technique used here is not substantially different from that employed on Pure Holocaust or the band's other black metal efforts of the early 1990s... so much for creativity.
Let's be perfectly clear: Immortal is not black metal. Immortal is, at best, imitation black metal.
Abbath and Demonaz have always been jealous of musicians like Fenriz and Varg Vikernes, who could actually produce true black metal music without dressing up like flamboyant 1970 homosexuals and wearing homoerotic make-up like a teenage Justin Bieber.
Just read what Abbath has to say about Varg Vikernes, it reeks of idol worship: "I got him into Old Funeral, did you know that? And through Old Funeral, he got into the scene. Also through Immortal. And then he got in touch with Euronymous and Mayhem".
I don't want to sound homophobic, but that's just... gross.
Modern Gay Sauce Frauds
Whatever fetish Abbath and Demonaz have about Fenriz, Zephyrous and Varg, they can in no way pretend to stand on the same level as their idols in terms of artistic talent.
The brilliance of Burzum and Darkthrone's classic releases from 1991 to 1994 lays in the ability of these works to evoke ideas of great complexity through the careful manipulation of deceptively simple music. In that regard, these albums were highly advanced despite being birthed from a spirit of atavistic black metal primitivism.
Another example of (good) modern black metal is Nekros Nemesis, an album that perfected the ritualistic atmospheres or early second-wave black metal. Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas is also a good example.
The characteristic expression of this blackened art takes the musical form of basic yet entrancing riffs made gloriously ambiguous through extended phrases and a resolute refusal to allow melodies to resolve in any predictable fashion.
Northern Chaos Gods has none of that, and it's not really surprising considering that Immortal were never part of the early Norwegian black metal scene - both Abbath and Demonaz are hated by Vikernes and Fenriz, and relatively unknown to Euronymous - nor do they have anything to do with the third-wave of black metal.
They are, like their butt-buddies from Gorgoroth (another clown band), a pure media creation, not having any relationship with black metal outside of fanatically worshiping Varg Vikernes and Fenriz like a teenage girl at a Justin Bieber concert.
For all the joke about Satyr being a closet homo, he at least was a well-known figure to both Euronymous and Varg Vikernes. Abbath, Demonaz and other clowns like Inferanus? They are non-entities.
Not surprisingly, Modern Gay Sauce Frauds is long on pretense and contempt for its audience, and perilously short on talent and any meaningful creative impulse.
Anyone who already has the classic works of Mayhem's Deathcrush or Bathory's first two albums has pretty much heard every riff on this giant turd - and heard them without the annoying repetition and obnoxious production values.
Many metalheads will be crying foul because this is a nu-metal/deathcore album, full of chugga-chugga breakdowns as you'd expect from Bring Me The Horizon.
But the real crime isn't that Immortal released a nu-metal album, the real crime is that even after nearly three decades of posing, Immortal still hasn't given up on pretending to be part of a genre that despises them.
Northern Anos Frauds is shit, deal with it.
Northern Chaos Gods score: 0/100.
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