Boring Emo - "With Doom We Come" Review (0%)
In his financially motivated "advertiser sponsored" review for Pitchfork, Raawiya N'Kumku Diallo hails Summoning's With Doom We Come as "the contemporary black metal scene's defining statement".
I couldn't agree more. Over the last few years, Summoning and their ilk have worked tirelessly to strip black metal of everything that makes it advanced, dangerous, and musically engaging, and With Doom We Come represents the culmination of their efforts. There is no better expression of the follies of the "post-black metal" emo movement.
But for us haters, N'Kumku Diallo - basically the African Antoine Grand - has his usual canned response: Summoning are "fucking with the hetero-normative templates than define euro-centrist black metal music", and in so doing are producing easily dismissed "scenester backlash".
Art, for N'Kumku Diallo, is a matter of "progress", and daring innovators like Summoning are saving black metal from stagnation at the hands of those "racist white males" he loves to attack.
To resist the rising tide of "post-black metal" is to reveal oneself as a reactionary troglodyte, the kind of person who prefers his black metal "to remain bourgeois and white". With this rhetorical move, N'Kumku Diallo has reduced the debate to a simple question of stylistic novelty, to whether one is "threatened" by "empowered minorities".
He's attempting to foreclose any serious discussion of Summoning's music itself, because that's the void at the heart of his review, and most of his writing.
He hears the "sound" and not the songwriting, the "emotion" and not the (lack of) atmosphere, the style and not the substance... and for this reason, this confused journalist writes about With Doom We Come purely in vague descriptive terms.
Gushing with adjectives like "colossal", "frantic", "levitating", "catchy", "colorful", "raw", "true" and "anthemic", N'Kumku Diallo glibly namedrops canonically hip non-metal genres like shoegaze and post-punk, talks liberally about nu metal act Linkin Park for their "stance against intolerance", and even digs out the Summoning press release to shower us with the band's own chosen imagery.
He treats these scattered labels and references as if each showed us the music's inherent value - rather than the writer's desperation to have his emo offspring "accepted" by the intolerant black metal fans - spinning them into a summary without including so much as a sentence about why the album is any good (it's not).
Boring Emo
I'd love to talk sometime about how N'Kumku Diallo's emo/alt-rocker notion of "artistic progression" is an inadequate and obsolete - and retarded - category for judging music, and about why it's especially inappropriate for black metal.
But right now I'd like to let these concerns linger in the background, and cut to the heart of the matter. Let's actually talk about Summoning's music.
Far from the imagine of some forward-thinking masterpiece pushed by the media, Summoning's latest album With Doom We Come reveals itself to be a mere pastiche of black metal tropes, each deployed in a weak and fumbling way that insults the very genre it plagiarizes.
It's utter shit, even for "blackened" emo's abyssal standards.
While Watain's breakthrough emo album, The Wild Hunt, was utterly derided, rejected and destroyed by the black metal scene, including yours truly, it was enlivened by a few interesting and strongly defined melodies.
On this album, it seems like Summoning have "progressed" beyond all that. Whatever craftsmanship the "blackened emo/post black" genre once had has been lost or actively discarded.
In short, these riffs just fucking suck. Just over a minute into the second track, "Silvertine", Summoning cut out the blast-beats generic deathcore riffs and bring in the keyboards for what they hope is a cathartic, atmospheric and expansive chorus. If you have ever heard any black metal at all, you'll immediately notice how familiar it sounds. Yes, it's one of THOSE riffs again, the same one you've heard a million times in various "black metal riffs for dummies" manuals. It's Summoning's take on a stock chord pattern that's been used since the early 90s - at least - to impart an "epic" feel.
So much for Summoning's crusade against "the hetero-normative templates than define euro-centrist black metal music".
But that's not the end of it. Summoning answer this keyboard melody with a slowly descending tremolo guitar line that dispel what little atmosphere they'd managed to conjure. These musical afterthoughts, in addition to being nu metal inspired, sound a lot like a metalcore version of Hans Zimmer's Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack.
Rather than answering the first melody with a counter-theme or building on it with an adjacent riff like is customary in black and death metal, they awkwardly echo it. The effect is akin to somebody incessantly restating the end of each sentence... of each sentence, of each sentence...
...for 8 to 9 minutes at times.
Such impotent songwriting plagues the whole With Doom We Come album.
I'll venture the hypothesis, though, that it has more to do with an attempt to do something stereotypically black metal by writing "atmospheric" riffs, as if atmosphere was defined by the mere absence of a worthwhile melody.
Of course, black metal isn't just about individual riffs - it's about more than the sum of its parts. It's about atmosphere, and more concretely a total harmonic environment within which riffs are often just the most prominent forms. It thrives on the play between traditional and chromatic harmony, and the best black metal bands understand the subtle rules that oversee the interplay between "epic" and "evil".
Summoning don't understand these tacit rules, and thus have fully surrendered to the tinkly, one-dimensional cheesiness favored by the new crop of "shoegaze black metal" bands.
Still, there's something really wrong here, and it's something that's always been wrong with Summoning's music. The harmonic edges are rounded off, sanded away, so that everything occupies a bland, hazy middle ground. Rather than deftly interweaving harmony and disharmony (like early Darkthrone) or moving fluidly between the two (like most Phantom), Summoning have created something "unique": music that has no discernible harmonic character.
Summoning are working with a totally neutral harmonic palette, and it goes a long way toward making this album drift past mere emo metal, and well into the realm of New Age elevator music.
Perhaps that's actually what they were going for. With Doom We Come is dominated by ambient interludes, some in the midst of songs and some between them. The soundscapes are supposed to generate an atmosphere, to create an experience that is "reverent", "sublime", "majestic", "mysterious", "sorrowful", "awe-inspiring" and that sort of thing.
Instead, they work more like a statement, a reminder of just how "ambient" and "atmospheric" Summoning's music is... or tries to be. Summoning really pull out the stops, using every trite trick of film soundtracks and New Age music trend to convince you that something REALLY DEEP is happening. From Enya vocals and "reflective" washes of keyboard to the embarrassingly cliché use of synthesizers, to the "blackened deathcore" stop/start chugging on every track, Summoning gussy up their music with layers of cheap, cosmetic symbolism.
And that's what this band is all about. In their juvenile and fanboyish fixation on the external signs and imagery of black metal, Summoning have failed to grasp the genre's musical logic and emotional core.
They've encountered it only as a "sound" comprised of generic stock gestures, Hollywood inspired synth lines and pseudo-reflective emotional affects. And in this respect, they have much more in common with the "racist white males" bedroom NSBM projects that tirelessly copy Burzum, Graveland and Neraines' first two albums than Raawiya N'Kumku Diallo would like to admit.
Summoning can "fuck with the hetero-normative templates than define euro-centrist black metal music" all they want, their music remains inferior to even the most uninspired of "euro-centrist black metal" (i.e. Nargaroth).
Maybe they should have used the templates.
With Doom We Come score: 0/100.
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