Blackened Emo Music - "Deep Calleth upon Deep" Review (0%)
Pretty much anything can go down the drain, and this includes black metal. By the way, Deep Calleth Upon Deep is not real black metal, this is "blackened emo", which is sort of the devolution of black metal into a lower being.
I hate to sound like a stupid, annoying elitist, but Deep Calleth Upon Deep is a terrible album from a terrible band.
It does have a few moments which I admit are catchy, but overall, the album is very annoying and unpleasant to listen to. Sure, it's "avant-garde", but what the fuck does that mean anyway. Simply having a catchy pop chorus and "heavy" mallcore breakdowns does not make music good.
What makes music good is a balance of technicality, musicality and atmosphere, which Deep Calleth Upon Deep obviously lacks. It has a few ambient sections, but everything is very poorly written. This is like some Nightwish fans learned to play black metal, and so blackened emocore was born.
The vocals on here are boring as fuck. Luckily, Dimmu-esque emo whimpers are not the main element, but the growls and screams are flat and boring.
There is little emotion behind them, other than a bit of teenage anger that appears to be "angry" at nothing, for no other reason than to fake emotion in what is otherwise just a piece of plastic, generic and interchangeable garbage. The high-pitched screams are used to a lesser extent, and they are honestly the least bad of the two. The low "brutal" vocals get very annoying, and unfortunately seem omnipresent on each and every track.
Deep Calleth Upon Deep takes everything wrong with Nemesis Divina and just doubles down on the commercial stupidity of bands like Watain, Cradle of Filth and Dimmu Borgir.
Blackened Emo Music
Most of the riffs on Deep Calleth Upon Deep are generic beyond belief. We have the typical Slipknot inspired "chug chug chug chug" type shit with the occasional quasi-lead fill.
When chugging and filling is not being done, annoying "melodic" metalcore riffs are being played in low tunings, sometimes in a tremolo fashion, sometimes in a nu-metal inspired breakdown. The guitar playing is definitely not interesting. The same goes for the bass, only to an even greater extent as you can't even hear it properly over the shitty guitar production.
I am sure my overt negativity towards Deep Calleth Upon Deep is getting annoying and rebarbative, not unlike the music on the album to be honest, so why not share some of the album's higher points?
The drumming, I admit, is decent. The drums are perhaps the only decent thing going on. Some occasional drum fills are interesting, but like everything else on the album, it gets repetitive and annoying really fast. The one good song on the album is Ghost of Rome. It has some nice vocal lines, but the lyrics are fucking stupid.
Deep Calleth Upon Deep sucks balls because it tries too hard to be "avant-garde".
Experimenting with various genre fusions is nice, but music is about much more than just being experimental for the sake of novelty.
Satyricon needs to stop focusing on being "avant-garde", and they need to start focusing on playing good music.
This emo shit has no place calling itself metal, let alone black metal.
Deep Calleth upon Deep score: 0/100.
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