Closet Pop Music - "Sworn to the Dark" Review (0%)
If you can imagine the post-1990 period for Metallica and Sodom combined and turned up to eleven, the basic idea of Watain as a pop marketing product will shine through genre labels such as "black metal".
This music has little in common with early Mayhem, Burzum, Darkthrone, Bathory, Immortal, Thorns, Emperor or other founders of the genre. If anything, it resembles 1980s glam metal given the black metal treatment with extremely distorted vocals, absurdist "satanic" lyrics, and a higher dose of estrogen induced infertility.
And before the canonization of extreme metal, in other words before black and death metal "became their own thing", there was music like this, which interpreted "metal" riffs as a kind of carnival of opposites, where contrasting tones and rhythms were designed to cycle around a rock song structure, but it was more "extreme" not because of the substance, but only by virtue of the aggressive technique and contrasting ("shocking") style.
In this view, however, the black and speed metal techniques used by Watain on albums such as this become mere decoration to the underlying pop / rock aspirations of the music, and so while it doesn't appear to be rock music even to those acquainted with rock tropes and techniques, on the level of design and structure it is, and it is correspondingly empty once you get past the fast ripped scales and emo chords unraveling from bouncy rhythmic grooves into deathcore chugging on the root notes.
The sub-genre that comes closest to perpetuating this tradition is nu metal, a genre where extreme metal technique is likewise used to create pop / rock compositions built around an immovable tonal centre - as in rock, pop, grunge, screamo - and/or a rhythmic pattern - as in rap, funk or avant-garde jazz - but never around a thematic narrative or coherent atmosphere, produced not just by the individual melodies but by the interplay between different themes, motifs, and phrasal "riffs" (or notes) that progress linearly - as in classical music or black and death metal.
Closet Pop Music
The bounding, two-hit drumming that pervades the music on Sworn to the Dark underlines this basic normalcy so, like a hipster, Watain's music dresses itself up as something "extreme" and "unique" (black metal) but at its essence, is the same old boring shit (pop) given a good dose of metal technique.
Like pop, Watain's songs build themselves around either a "catchy" chorus or a memorable riff, and the rest of the time create a primitive groove based on an expectation of rhythmic satisfaction (also like pop).
Like pop and most alt rock, the guitars support the rhythmic efforts and/or the vocals, the latter which then take centre stage in what feels like a "try hard" theatrical performance that foreshadows and echoes the dominant rhythms of each piece, before return to chugs on the root note of the scale for the (vocally driven) chorus.
Like pop and emo, the lead guitars never stray too far from the harmonic minor scale, and the riffs sound like they time traveled straight out of the 1980s' least masculine glam metal acts, but played faster and more incoherently.
The result delivers a compact sound that displays little internal variation, but instead chooses to build a rhythmic contrast between a soft verse section and an aggressive, anthemic chorus (like pop). Note that this is just "reverse" nu metal, instead of a hard verse and soft chorus, Watain does the opposite.
Watain is pop rock, not metal, and certainly not black metal.
With that out of the way, I don't feel the need to insult or demean either Watain, its band members, or the album Sworn to the Dark as others have done repeatedly and sometimes tactlessly in the past.
Watain is no more incompetent than your average nu metal act, with whom they share many substantial similarities on how they view their music.
In fact, if taken as a nu metal album, Sworn to the Dark is rather convincing both in concept and in execution in comparison to Linkin Park, Slipknot, Machine Head and the rest of the Warner Bros' "heavy metal" roster. If compared not to black metal, which it is not, but to pop and/or nu metal, Sworn to the Dark is in fact the superior nu metal album and a landmark towards which bands such as Korn and Slipknot should aspire, aim to approach, and perhaps someday they will even surpass it if they work hard and persevere in their "art"...
But if Watain's work is clearly the archetype for most albums of this nature to follow, it nonetheless misses what is unique about (actual) metal and in its neurotic desperation to hide its inner (pop) nature, succeeds in making a mess where one did not need to be. Like the work of Limp Bizkit, Drowning Pool, Trapt and System of a Down of old, however, it creates an oil-on-water separation between the superficial metal aesthetics (the style) from the pop / rock / screamo structure (the substance), and so the entire Sworn to the Dark album comes apart in your hands like a boiled squishy turd.
Which is why it gets a zero.
Sworn to the Dark score: 0/100.
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