Try Hard Emo Music - "Lugburz" Review (0%)
Starting off with what sounds like a pop punk band covering a The Cure song while a spastic ADD drummer hits his kit randomly, it's safe to say the rest of this album is a pretend black metal sham, and it is. The song then goes into a fast strummed indie chords part for a "bittersweet" effect, and technique used in pop rock and various other non-metal genre.
This is pretty much the extent of the emotional expression contained in this album Lugburz, aside from some "reflective" synth pieces that accomplish the same thing - i.e. inducing boredom - minus the "pretending to be a black metal band" part.
The worst thing is Summoning fail to even do that. This whole things feels like the byproduct of focus groups coming up with a way to repackage an Evanescence album in a way that would appeal to Norther and Darkthrone fans at the same time through the "symphonic black metal" gimmick.
To start off, the lyrics are inappropriate for black metal. It's one thing to use the Lord of the Rings references to enhance the atmosphere of the music, but it's a completely different issue to homosexualize the characters of Tolkien's novels to "make a point" about social issues such as gay rights, as Summoning shamelessly does on Lugburz.
But even more than that, they read like some whiny hot topic kids egocentric musings about how life has wronged him because of heartbreak and other mundane "high school" topics, translated into Middle-Earth drivel that doesn't even make sense most of the time.
I suppose they felt the Lord of the Rings' universe and topics can be cliché and wanted to drum up their indie "slam poets" card to show people how deep they are, despite completely shitting on an entire metal genre, but the whole thing comes across as something even Infernus and Gaahl wouldn't dare envision.
Try Hard Emo Music
These lyrics are appropriate enough, however, for the "emo" that they bury under black metal aesthetics to fool morons into believing that they are buying the next new thing.
Bittersweet, mundane topics for a honky, whiny album. You can tell these whiners Protector and Silennius have made a bad album just by reading them. The whole thing reads off like some self-pitying, Kurt Cobain styled bored youth vapidity. Just moping and whining, Gandalf and Aragorn in lieu of the paternal figures that abandoned them.
The hippies have won. Everything wrong with modern "black metal" can be found on this album.
For starters, it's not even a black metal album, having more in line with the screamo with more minor chords and blastbeats variant that is referred to as "emo-violence" - portmanteau of emo and powerviolence - like their clone targets Cradle of Filth.
The only thing that makes this "black metal" is a couple rare moments where a "blackened emo" part akin to something maybe Satyricon would have done makes an appearance to break up some of the monotony. And even then, it feels like a generic DSBM part that could have been borrowed from Nargaroth, Alcest or Xasthur.
The rest sounds like Sonata Arctica discovered tremolo picking and hired the wrong drummer, which is where people came up with the conclusion that they mix black metal with post-rock and shoegaze elements. The songs go nowhere, droning on incessantly in one fixed mood - bittersweet melancholy - underscoring "emotional" vocals that are more akin to what an "extreme" screamo vocalist - like Dani Filth - would perform than any kind of black metal vocals.
The end result is whine rock with nothing to offer, but since it's in a more "extreme" form, you can lie to people and tell them that this is a "nu" kind of black metal and they will buy it, even though it is absolutely impossible to differentiate between Summoning's music ("blackened" emo) and the things Summoning's fans claim they hate (supposedly emo).
The fact that these guys have no problem riding the waves of this marketing gimmick for the sake of popularity reveals just how insincere their brand of "blackened emo" - and their band - is.
These guy don't understand black metal and this album feels like it was written by a bunch of guys who should be known for playing Lush covers to Starbucks aficionados than anything remotely related to heavy metal.
If you think ironically juxtaposing underground black metal aesthetics - where only the fast drumming and fast chord strumming techniques are utilized - with the music of Adele or James Blunt is the next "nu" creative frontier, then do yourself a favor: stop listening to metal, or pretending to, and go search for early 90s 4AD records releases. At least that way you can listen to crap in it's original form instead of this insincere whine rock.
Vapid, like all of Summoning's try hard emo music.
Lugburz score: 0/100.
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