Blackened Edgy Motörhead - "Semper Fidelis" Review (15%)
Though the genre tag in my media player says 'black metal', this is actually limp-dick hard rock (not even indie rock) with a barely edgy aesthetic. One man is responsible for this clown show, including the humiliatingly effeminate vocals. The best parts of Semper Fidelis remind me of another one-man half-assed heavy metal act, Ildjarn, that, while equally incompetent, was at least not overwhelmingly homoerotic.
Semper Fidelis does nothing to disguise the surly disgust the underground feels for Nargaroth's frontman Kanwulf, otherwise known as 'the (Anal) Cunt of Germany'. Like other black metal trendies, they feature all the external aspects of controversy without the amazing music that made people other than desperate fanboys notice: chiaroscuro NatSoc overtones, adherence to 'trueness', novelty for the sake of novelty, catchy hooky songs that go nowhere, lots of talk about keeping black metal real, yo.
When you boil it down, just about anyone can make a formulaic thrashing riff from a known archetype and then drop to kick-beat, shrilly screaming until the collapse, without having songs that go anywhere.
In Kanwulf's defense, these are pleasant Motörhead-y songs that bounce along well as long as you aren't looking for challenging or otherwise difficult music - i.e. actual black metal.
Certainly, it'd take Nargaroth's worst any day over the pile of emo shit that calls itself 'post-black metal' nowadays.
If this band could heed any advice, it would be to ditch the forced black metal stylings and the pretense by implication, and just make Motörhead style rock-metal. The Brits are due to retire soon anyway, so we'll need a successor, and that seems more the headspace in which this band composes.
Blackened Edgy Motörhead
Quick, what's the best new thing?
Something that's the old thing… but sounds new!
You can make anything sound different with different production, playing at different speeds, adding tremolo in lieu of individual notes or using 'harsh' black metal vocals or more distortion.
And so if you take Iron Maiden or Motörhead, throw in some blast-beasts, but keep it nice and tastily 'melodic', you'll have the perfect product. People can be undercover conformists.
They too can look like rebels for listening to this angry and hateful sounding music, but underneath it, there's that same old happy Lemmy Kilmister that millions of people the world over enjoy.
Nargaroth is, in that regard, the perfect product and judging from his relatively unearned notoriety, it's working out well for him.
And why not, he's good at what he does: interpreting old school heavy metal in a darker and perhaps more aggressive (debatable) way.
But black metal, it is not.
Songs like 'Der Satan Ist' and 'Der Leiermann' have nothing to do with the music of Darkthrone or Burzum. It's basic speed metal with 'extreme' vocals.
Merely 'edgy' Motörhead/Maiden/Metallica worship.
Semper Fidelis score: 15/100.
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