The Unbearable Boredom of Watain's Music - "Casus Luciferi" Review (0%)
Lousy nu metal act in denial Watain has brought yet another stillborn child into the world of black metal.
It has all the ingredients, but somehow it is not alive. It possesses such an unbearable need to be black metal, such a stench of try-hardism, such a self-conscious fixation of black metal's imagery that it could very well be considered a satire.
But it isn't.
This makes Casus Luciferi painfully embarrassing to listen to, the annoyance it causes being staved off by a feeling of uncomfortable pity. While the album will entertain and even have the superficial effects of black metal music on the young, the naive and/or the stupid metalheads, it will translate into a sure headache for anyone expecting the music to say something besides "I play black metal".
Casus Luciferi is the sort of album that a band with a lot of black metal in its system, but altogether too few neurons, could put together in about a week or so. It suffers from a reliance on rhythmic faux-aggressive "riffs" completely divorced from strong themes that it is borderline nu metal.
As it replaces atmosphere with "catchiness", song structure with pop progressions, guitar riffs with deathcore chugging, concrete content with emotion, the music becomes a huge mess of unrelated and sometimes contradictory gimmicks of different genres of metal coexistent in one incoherent and irritating package.
In order to counter the effects of its own unfocused babbling, Watain resorts to the simplest means of keeping the music on a rhythmic and tonal centre, namely, bringing each song back to early chugging and/or groove riffs and circular verse-chorus appendages within which an incongruous heap of generic emo vocals can run completely out of context over riffs with little to no connection to one another.
Boring mallcore is boring, but to add insult to injury Watain insists upon calling their mess of failed deathcore "true black metal". Sad.
The Unbearable Boredom of Watain's Music
The previous review on this site placed the Casus Luciferi album squarely in the nu metal category alongside bands such as Korn, Drowning Pool, Linkin Park, Pantera, Machine Head and Slipknot.
This is very appropriate as the vector for thematic development doesn't seem to be either atmosphere or a coherent motif based narrative, as in black metal, but a reliance on "contrast" between a "hard" rhythmic section and a "soft" chorus, as in nu metal and pop punk/goth/rock before that.
Regardless of its genre, image and gimmicks, music must nonetheless deliver something more than a mere semi-random arrangement of notes, especially from within its intended context and mentality! If it fails to exploit the ground from which it grows, expanding from worldview and mentality to musical mood and then to riff based thematic atmosphere concretely and coherently, then it simply fails as music no matter how interesting or "different" the original ideas were.
Rather than a metaphysical reflection of the world thrown into chaos, as with Burzum's Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, listening to Casus Luciferi makes me picture a drunk, brain-dead schizophrenic swinging an axe at imagined foes in the middle of a circus to the soundtrack of Watain's incoherent carnival music. Perhaps this picture is also an accurate representation of civilization's thin veneer, after all. Perhaps Watain has succeeded in portraying the self-deceiving nonsense and purposeless chaos they criticize in modern civilization through the literal mediocrity of their music.
While at first one could be tempted to say that what Watain plays is black metal, albeit of a very generic nature, and that it has stylistic coherence, the microscope reveals something different... it's not even black metal, as even bad black metal is superior to this.
Their music, not only on this last fiasco but throughout the band's play discography, is namely an extremely distracted riff salad in which the individual - and plagiarized - riffs can be brought in from sources as different as Iron Maiden to Dissection, to Manowar's campy choruses, to overused thrashy Sodom riffs, to early Mayhem, to nu-Mayhem (ew, gross), to Antekhrist, to war metal, to indie rock, to alternative nu and groove "metal".
Watain does nothing special here, they only prove that you don't need to be an eloquent composer to impress a crowd of nu metal fans. There is never an interesting moment on this album.
Casus Luciferi is nu metal pretending to be black metal so that posers who discovered black metal through Vice Magazine can listen to Marilyn Manson without admitting that they like listening to Marilyn Manson.
On a side note, Watain's "theistic satanist" gimmickry is just so hysterically nonthreatening that the album almost deliberately degenerates into a parody of the genre, complete with cringe-worthy gang vocals, Linkin Park riffs and lyrics about depression.
Casus Luciferi score: 0/100.
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