Alternative Soy Emo - "The Shadowthrone" Review (0%)
This duo of hippies in denial have improved in the songwriting department from their debut, but in doing so reveal the underlying emo of their music.
It's clearer than ever before that Satyricon were never black metal but in the most superficial fashion.
This Shadowthrone album allows the 'post-metal' to shine, but musically 'post-metal' is identical to emo, a subset of late hardcore/indie rock hybrids of the late 1980s.
Nothing has changed since that time, so if you've been in a cave since 1984 you might enjoy The Shadowthrone. This album is far less random than their debut and, while they still try to ape black metal with heavy guitar distortion and howled vocals, in songwriting, harmony and choice of scale this material would fit in on a Tokio Hotel or My Chemical Romance album more than any black metal work.
In fact it's a complete sham to ever list this band as black metal because it misses out on what they do well, which is a very slow and dumbed down version of emo.
Droning emptiness portrayed with slightly dissonant tracks that sound like self-pity incarnate.
It evokes a lot of different feelings that all boil down to shame, pity and a non-negligible bit of, uh, curiosity for non-heterosexual romance.
I wouldn't recommend this band for any metal fan or anyone who remembers the late 1980s.
Or people not into 'alternative' sexual orientations.
Alternative Soy Emo
If any of you were to discover that your testosterone levels were too high, and your doctor advised you to take estrogen injections: before doing that, consider listening to The Shadowthrone - in approximately 3 minutes, you will feel immediate results.
Someone mentioned this album as a 'classic' of great rarity. It may be rare - but it should be rarer. Did you want 1980s style emo rock, with disconnected vocals floating above some standard riffs spewed from guitars turned into percussive instruments like the shittiest mallcore band? Yeah, it's something like that. The result is cheesy and not particularly memorable, although I'm certain it's rare. Hopefully someone will eventually buy up the remaining copies and exile them to Queer Island so no one has to hear this. It's emo rock with speed metal riffs and none of the grace.
It's important to note that borrowing a few techniques from the metal genre doesn't make you a metal band. It's not because Nirvana lifted the main riff from Venom's 'Countess Bathory' - on 'Smells Like Teen Spirits' - that Nirvana is all of a sudden a metal band. Likewise, it's not because the two Satyricon morons cosplay as 'true black metal satanists' while writing emo music, with emo lyrics, that they can claim to be black metal.
Underneath the 'harsh' vocals and 'extreme' drumming are mechanical nu-metal riffs and emocore noodlings.
You can just about hear the teenage bedrooms of America, reeking of self-pity and masturbation, where the obese and inbred listen to this.
The Shadowthrone is organized to seem more like an emo album with its pop-punk 'sadness' and feminine vocals that reflect a feeling of being 'hurt' by 'mean society and girls with standards', much like their clone targets in Dimmu Borgir and Cradle of Filth.
If the Satyricon clowns were more honest with themselves, and their audience, they would drop the superficial 'extreme' portions of their imagery and become the next Bullet For My Valentine.
The Shadowthrone score: 0/100.
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