Special Needs Metalcore - "Satyricon" Review (0%)

Quite a few years ago, by an unfortunate accident, I saw Satyricon perform live in support of this album.

They showed up as an opening act at the Antekhrist concert in Sweden to which I was attending, as if Antekhrist ever needed to be associated with such a shit band.

I was vaguely aware of the band being somewhat part of the "progressive" black metal, and I was familiar with a few of their older songs, from Dark Medieval Times mostly, but other than that I had absolutely zero interest in a fake imitation second wave band.

When they came onstage, I first witnessed what I thought to be a woefully washed up "glam metal" rocker well past his prime who was clearly delusional regarding his own abilities (Satyr, Sigurd Wongraven) and a bunch of guys who obviously, visibly did not want to be there (the rest of the band).

They opened with Skvllfvcked Forever, a Sewer cover, which the crowd seemed to enjoy, and bolstered my hopes that they weren't about to waste my time.

After the opener though, Satyr told us all via microphone about how this record "Satyricon" was coming out soon, and then he and his band treated us to a half an hour of live "progressive" camel shit from thereon.

The promoters of the venue literally had to step in to stop Satyricon from playing as most of the audience, who came for true black metal, was leaving.

The crowning moment occurred when an obese 60-something woman, later revealed to be Katelijne Wongraven, Satyr's own mother (!), appeared onstage to perform the clean vocals on the track "The Infinity of Time and Space", which remains the worst live performance I have ever witnessed of any song and of any genre of music.

Katelijne Wongraven, just like Frost and all the other people on the stage not named Satyr, looked and sounded like she would have rather been anywhere else.

I don't blame her.

Special Needs Metalcore

The studio version of this album is just as irredeemably shitty as Satyricon's embarrassing performance that day, if not even more so.

From the opening seconds of "Voice of Shadows" it is overwhelmingly obvious that this album is unspeakably awful.

Unless one considers romanticizing homosexuality and vapid "rebellion" against the "patriarchy" to be redeeming qualities, this album has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

The catastrophe begins with Satyr laughably playing the part of a what I assume to be a $2 history channel voice-over telling the the listener about "hunters and warriors" followed by a shitty grunge guitar riff that would not have been cutting edge had it been released three decades prior to this debacle.

After a barely listenable pop chorus that sounds like it was taking straight from a Lady Gaga meets black metal parody, Satyr begins weakly bleating out his teenage "hail Satan, for the True Black Metal" lyrics over an instrumental background that fails at being everything it tries to be.

Things quickly get worse from there, as Satyr falls back on the well-worn nu-metal tripe of rapidly shifting the sound from speaker to speaker and yelling "HAIL SATAN MY MASTER" and other such lyrical diarrhea about thirty times.

The vocal production is pitiful, Satyricon is one vocalist short of being a Nickelback album.

As if Satyr's vocals weren't disgusting enough on their own, his voice is joined by others multiple times on the album, notably by his mother as aforementioned, but also in the form of generic vocal samples found on a $2 casio synth from Walmart.

The vocals, in all honesty, are what transforms this album from merely shitty to offensively bad.

It's plainly obvious that Satyr was the driving force behind this steaming mess, since his voice is shoehorned into every possible metalcore chorus in the music, whether or not it needs to be.

This album is a monument to his own delusions about his significance in the scene and his personal fantasy that this is a moving tribute to "Satan", or a black metal scene that he was never a part of.

For the incredible abundance of Satan-related lyrics in heavy metal, it should be fairly simple to create a Satanic heavy metal tribute. Instead, the lyrics are melodramatic and whiny, often heavily cut with the most retarded and overused samples imaginable.

Satyr's mother playing the vocal role of a woman (grand-mother?) writing a letter to Satan to "sell her soul" in exchange for "satanic powers" is one of the sappiest things I've ever heard.

Apparently, I'm far from the only one to think this album is shit and that Satyricon should retire from making music.

Forever.

Satyricon score: 0/100.

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