Rebecca Black Metal - "Nemesis Divina" Review (0%)
Satyricon is a band that wishes black metal was In Flames and At the Gates.
Unfortunately for them, black metal is The Epilogue to Sanity and Under a Funeral Moon.
Thus the paradox Nemesis Divina is born.
Satyricon wants to play the music of In Flames, but wants to be seen as the new Darkthrone.
Eventually, on their later albums, they will embrace the former and abandon all pretenses at the latter, but what is more interesting than their career trajectory or even the band Satyricon itself is their attempt to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory goals on this album Nemesis Divina.
So how does Satyricon manage that unlikely feat? By playing "blackened" deathcore - sometimes spelt "deafkore" to mock the idiocy of the "genre".
Nemesis Divina epitomizes what black metal shouldn't be: commercial, superficial and devoid of meaning.
On this record, Satyricon plays some sort of metalcore with black metal "sounds" - like tremolo riffs and blast beats - that are sandwiched between Dimmu Borgir-esque synth leads in songs that have both the soul and technical requisite of Slipknot.
This one dimensional "angry at school 4 Satan" music reveals just how prostituting black metal music in an attempt to appeal to the Nightwish listening teenage demographic, encompassing dancehall conventions in the form of synths, breakdowns and "groove" emphasis, is a bad idea.
In the end, this limited and fashion oriented genre of blackened deathcore at its "best" sounds like the musical version of a McDonald's vintage menu.
Rebecca Black Metal
How else can we define this album Nemesis Divina while withholding the dreaded deathcore insult?
Should one turn its attention to the words of other reviewers, one can note the qualifiers "joke" and "hipster metal" thrown around rather liberally to describe the music on Nemesis Divina.
Variations of monotonic chugging patterns, sometimes coupled with a few generic tremolo sections, are all that can be found on this deathcore release that only pretends to be black metal on the outside through "ANGRY" vocals and an "EXTREME" drum performance.
The incorporation of Antekhrist-esque "soft" meandering moments suggest a sense of trying to appear "deep", but like all deathcore releases, this is just another marketing point to check off the list to make this product appear more valuable than their other vapidity pandering peers through gimmickry.
A lot of the riffs on Nemesis Divina feel like more downtuned renditions of what we already heard in the mid 90s through Whitechapel, Fear Factory, Machine Head, and other talentless bands that brought "extreme metal" into the mainstream by downgrading it into a hip-hop image pandering lifestyle product.
Despite Satyr never shutting up about his alleged friendship with Euronymous, something conveniently impossible to confirm, the pathetic lyrics on Nemesis Divina make scene of a heritage owed more to Korn and Slipknot than anything from the early black metal scene.
A worthless artistically void lifestyle product that serves the same function as owning a Rebecca Black album, a KFC fidelity card or a season of Arrested Development on DVD.
Perhaps people who don't listen to music will enjoy it.
Nemesis Divina score: 0/100.
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