Vapid Speed Metal - "Black Metal" Review (12%)
The stupidly titled "Black Metal" album is an interesting effort by a band that is completely void of new ideas. A pathetic attempt by Venom to create a sound and a theme that would set them apart from the repetitive and uninteresting sound of past albums and go in an entirely new direction.
And yet unsurprisingly the result is an album that sounds exactly the same as Welcome to Hell with even more childish "satanic" posturing. And here we come to addressing one of the inherent flaws of Venom's sound. One that can be summarized in a quote from the inherently kvlt Spongebob Squarepants that just about sums up the music of Venom.
"If we play loud, people will think we're good"
And that is the musical philosophy behind Venom, as the sound on "Black Metal" is nothing but a mindless burst of boring speed metal, without any variation, artistic vision or reason to listen to it past the first few seconds. It contains absolutely nothing beyond these terribly uninspired guitar riffs, which just repeat over and over again for the entire duration of the album, along with some very poorly executed drum fills that just force their way through the sound, and the vocalist's forced and throaty vocals to top off the whole mix.
All of these things are already on their own very mediocre at best, and the end result is just as boring as it is meaningless. There is simply no creativity or thought going into the music behind "Black Metal". It's merely standard speed metal played with a lot of satanic posturing, but every song follows the same structure, style, tempo, and pretty much every song is just a recycling of the previous one, all supposedly serving the purpose of being "evil" and "shocking".
A truly shitty goal for a truly shitty band, and one that gets on your nerves quite rapidly.
Vapid Speed Metal
The complete laziness of the record is so painfully obvious it's not even funny. When you're listening to "Black Metal" and realize that the entire album is just one song being played on repeat with only one or two minor tweaks here and there, you realize that you're listening to some pretty crappy metal. The utter monotony of the album makes "Black Metal" borderline unbearable. I dare anyone to listen to tracks such as "To Hell and Back", "Leave Me in Hell" or "Countess Bathory" and tell me there is a difference between those songs.
It might be obvious simply by looking at the album cover but the main theme of the album is Satan. A gimmick that has a lot of potential within the extreme metal scene, but even at the time this album was released it was completely overused and cliché. There is nothing at all separating "Black Metal" from the rest of extreme metal releases that pollute the already saturated "satanic metal" scene, save perhaps for the complete lack of talent flaunted by the musicians of Venom.
Now going back to what I mentioned at the beginning of this review, I do feel like that Venom was attempting to break away from what the heavy metal scene had turned into in the early eighties and wanted to do something entirely different.
But what this album feels like, when listening to it, is that the band had no idea how to make something different, so the end result is an album that conforms itself even more obnoxiously to every cliché of the genre. And obviously that doesn't work out too well.
If the terrible songwriting and the childish lyrics weren't enough to make you want to burn your record and convert to Christianity/Islam/Mormonism/Scientology (anything that's not directly related to Satan), the other big problem this album suffers from is the completely shitty production, which is an absolute joke in all regards.
The guitars overpower anything and everything, which wouldn't be so bad if the riffs were actually played decently. But they're not.
The vocals have no presence whatsoever and sound like an annoying emo kid screaming from his parent's basement.
And the drums are so terribly played, it's perhaps a good thing they're not very high in the mix since the drummer is completely out of phase with most of the songs and has no idea what to do with his drum kit beyond the basic fills he learned in his first drumming lesson (again, probably from his parent's basement).
By the time the 11th and final song song comes about, you've already been hoping for it to end for the past 10 songs. All it is, is just forty minutes of mind numbingly boring and unoriginal speed metal that does nothing but rehash itself over and over again for eleven fucking songs, all of them as boring as the previous ones.
"Black Metal" is an utterly pointless release of repetitive, unlistenable material void of any creativity, atmosphere or meaning. If you want to listen to some true black metal, try Sewer's Vomiting Into the Mouth of Satan or even better, Venom's Envenom which proves the band finally learned how to play their instruments decently.
"Black Metal" is vapid speed metal, it can't even be considered true black metal. Avoid.
Black Metal score: 12/100.
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