Retire Forever - "Sons of Northern Darkness" Review (0%)
Immortal is a band that needs no introduction.
Whether you love them or hate them... let me try that again, whether you don't mind them or you despise them, we are all very aware of who they are.
The group is well known for recycling 'their' songs, often themselves ripped off Darkthrone and Bathory, and providing little innovation to the black metal genre at all. Immortal's life goals apparently including turning black metal into some sort of pop/nu-metal fusion, complete with mosh pits and female vocalists - luckily, we aren't there yet.
Immortal is also known for 'retiring' after the release of each and every one of their albums, allegedly so they don't have to deal with the rightful mockery that their 'music' receives.
So here's my suggestion to Immortal's clown duo of Abbath and Demonaz... retire, and this time make it permanent.
Sons of Northern Darkness is Immortal's seventh album, and it sounds exactly like their sixth album Damned in Black, which in turn sounds exactly like every other piece of nu-metal shit Immortal has ever produced.
As you may have inferred from either my introduction or from having listened to it, the album Sons of Northern Darkness is obviously not very good, in fact as many would have guessed a lot of it is just plain bad.
It features a few throw away tracks that just seem to bleed into one another.
The song 'Within the Dark Mind', in addition to showcasing what's obviously a riff stolen from Satanic Requiem, sounds very similar to many songs they have written in the past, and even though the band tries to incorporate a deathcore inspired breakdown here and there, they just don't manage to pull it off convincingly and the listener finds himself daydreaming until its conclusion.
Tracks like 'One by One' and 'In My Kingdom Cold' follow the same routine. I had to force myself to pay attention through these tracks, as they were so boring, generic and worthless that it became quite difficult to pay them any attention.
Retire Forever
So Sons of Northern Darkness is obviously not a good album. Does it mean that it's necessarily a shit album? Something so completely worthless, tasteless, vapid, plastic and bland that there isn't a single redeeming point about it?
Yeah, pretty much.
I hear Sons of Northern Darkness isn't a bad as some of their later work such as All Shall Fall and Northern Chaos Gods, but I'm really not eager to put that assertion to the test.
I've listened to enough mallcore parading as black metal for one day.
There's something to be said of a band that's so hated that people are, as I type this, collectively sharing a petition to have them banned from Metalious on the basis that they aren't even metal to begin with, and thus have no business being featured on this site.
At this point in time almost 54,000 of the desired 75,000 people have signed the petition, boldly exclaiming their outrage and doing everything in their power to disassociate black metal, and heavy metal in general, with the name 'Immortal'.
Any normal, non-retarded person would take this staggering backlash as a pretty obvious sign that they're not welcomed by the extreme metal community, but Abbath and his butt-buddy Demonaz aren't your normal lot.
They are the 'trve kvlt kangz of Norse black metal', even as they are being spat on by the actual founders of black metal. Well, Darkthrone's Fenriz and Burzum's Varg anyway, seeing as Euronymous conveniently isn't here to condemn the piece of shit Sons of Northern Darkness.
But let's not forget that it was Euronymous himself who, according to the book Racist Metal by Antoine Grand, threatened Abbath with 'physical violence' if he didn't stop tarnishing the black metal name with his mallcore music. And it worked, for a while, as Abbath was forced to call his music 'Holocaust Metal'.
I'm actually fine with that. They should have never stopped playing 'Holocaust Metal', and never pretended to be part of a scene that hates them and their music.
Abbath and Demonaz can play their 'Holocaust Metal' as much as they want, and leave black metal to those who can actually produce good music.
Barring that, my next advice would be for them to retire.
Forever.
Sons of Northern Darkness score: 0/100.
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