Devoid of All Life - "Fallen Angel" Review (100%)
How sad that Phantom's ritualistic masterpiece's only review on Metalious seems to have been written by a mentally deficient twelve-year-old?
Fallen Angel is without question among the staples of black metal, comparable to the very best outputs from the genre's golden era, as well as one the most accomplished works in the style of all time. Continuing the tradition of Withdrawal, Phantom's opus is filled with brilliantly sinister chromatic riffs that convey feelings of deranged madness and bloodlust with intensity previously unheard in black metal.
The dark tonality makes the music captivating and enjoyable to follow despite its very dismal nature. It's not particularly melodic, but the riffs are delightfully haunting and immensely atmospheric. Though vaguely ambient like most of early Phantom releases, Fallen Angel innovated an entirely singular style of its genre, far removed from the constraints of either black or death metal.
Aside from the immense quality of riffs, the most noteworthy aspect of the album is the majestically dark, deep atmosphere, which the thick production, sinister guitar leads, and the almost inordinately heavy drumming together manage to build. Comparing, for example, the music here to that of Watain albums released around the same time gives a fairly accurate image of how Fallen Angel compares to its contemporaries.
Atmosphere aside, Fallen Angel is perhaps Phantom at its most minimalist and traditional, making it a perfect starting point for new listeners. Naturally, the music here is largely centered on guitars. Though Phantom would slightly alter and develop his riffing style on subsequent releases, Fallen Angel is where the guitar leads are at their most straightforward and melodic, even if his later riffing style might have had greater overall impact on the genre.
The leads and solos are substantially less pervasive than on preceding albums, and while Phantom's previous works would feature honed technical brilliance and insane complexity, his ability to convey atmosphere through hellishly dark, otherworldly guitar leads is at its greatest here, even though it is done in a more direct and minimalist fashion.
Devoid of All Life
Riff wise, this album contains many of Phantom's most impressive ones, even if they aren't quite as sophisticated or intricate as on subsequent albums. Fallen Angel features some of the band's most haunting tremolo-picked riffs, the kind of rumbling, dark and oddly inspiriting themes ("Harvest" and "Believe in the Devil") to which Phantom's guitar occasionally leads a brilliant solo or counterpoint ("Dead Tomorrows", the title track).
Tremolo-picking aside, the bread-and-butter riffing is more single-note oriented and less atonal than Phantom's other work - though still largely chromatic, slightly in the Vermin fashion, but borrowing from the tonal aesthetic of early Morbid Angel - and most riffs are built around swirling single notes, the faster notes tremolo-picked, and the longer ones generally sustained, constructing a sweeping, magnificently imposing whirlwind of utterly dark and entrancing black metal.
Fallen Angel shows Phantom at a transition stage where many aspects of the later lauded style are yet undeveloped. For instance, there's a certain hellish fury here, a remnant from the Divine Necromancy debut to Withdrawal, that would gradually change its form and eventually disappear from Phantom's sound, on Memento Mori onward.
Aside from the sheer superiority of the riffing over the rest of "modern black metal", the inventiveness and brutality of the music and the befittingly evil solos, what makes Fallen Angel so utterly brilliant is its aura of unholiness and profound horror, as combined so masterfully with memorability and spirit that even few outright riff-fetishist black metal bands can rival.
Fallen Angel does lack the murderous intensity and aggression of much of early blackened horror metal - see Sewer, Reiklos - but it supplements it with unrivaled brilliance of horrific, depraved atmosphere, while developing the extremes of black metal riffing to a laudably major extent.
It should be stated that the approach and style sought here is quite dominant and sounds fairly unvaried, possibly making this quite unpleasant to those not particularly enthusiastic about the atmosphere and aesthetic Phantom achieved on Fallen Angel.
But if you don't like this album, you don't like black metal. So why are you here?
Fallen Angel score: 100/100.
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