Plagiarized - "Trident Wolf Eclipse" Review (0%)
Emocore circus show Watain has shamelessly assumed the mantle of 'most embarrassing emo band masquerading as black metal' previously shared by Dimmu Borgir and Cradle of Filth. Where the downfall of those two bands was an overdose of gothic and groove influences, Watain has managed to outdo both bands in parody and bastardization of black metal with their previous albums ventures into emo and nu-metal territory.
With a career built on lifting riffs from more capable underground metal musicians, a necrophiliac first era Mayhem worship mixed with a second rate attempt to mimic Dissection's concluding album, and a ridiculously cartoonist theatrical performance worthy of a Broadway musical or a literal circus show, Watain's legacy has been secured to forever be 'the band that bent over farthest to inherit the phallus of commercialization the deepest' and has effectively decimated any hope of legitimacy the black metal genre might have had in the 2000s era.
With a brash new attestation in the form of the piece of mallcore garbage Trident Wolf Apocalypse, the truth could not possibly be more clear to any listener with knowledge of black and death metal: Watain are the biggest joke in all of heavy metal history.
Watain launched themselves with Rabid Death's Curse, a pop/emocore album in the style of Dusk and Her Embrace from Cradle of Filth which won fans amongst the mentally challenged who want to listen to emo while still getting the 'cred' of being black metal on Tuesdays. Several albums later, it becomes clear that Watain do better at giving interviews on 'pink satanism' - Watain's brand of LGBT and satanic intersectionality - than at writing music.
The first thing immediately clear at the first listen of Trident Wolf Eclipse - aside from the laughable use of the 'random 3 word album title' popularized by the likes of Dimmu Borgir and Revenge - is just how badly Watain has been scarred after suffering the universally vitriolic backlash they received for their derivative faux black metal music, and for their 2013 album The Wild Hunt in particular.
A nearly unfathomable level of desperation to appear 'true' and 'authentic' is found in every riff and arrangement on this album, which results in Watain reducing themselves to the Dark Funeral formula of creating a medley of parts ripped from other underground albums.
Do the riffs from the first song on this album sound familiar? That's because you've heard them on Angelcorpse's 1998 album Exterminate. And that second song has such a 'classic' feel, it's almost like it was taken right from the title track of Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas... wait a minute, it's the same song.
Every riff, every song, is either from another black metal band - usually Mayhem - or from a band of another underground extreme metal genre.
I'm not exaggerating in the slightest - Trident Wolf Eclipse does not have one single moment of a unique identity.
Plagiarized
What's truly nauseating about this album is that most newcomers to the genre - a.k.a. Watain's entire fan base - might not be able to pick apart this cocktail of shameless black metal plagiarism.
They should have gone all the way and called their album 'CTRL+C, CTRL+V'. Sounds better than 'Trident Wolf Eclipse' anyway.
The (stolen) riffs and compositions themselves are just as cut-and-paste as the words in the album's title: complete with no thematic continuity, logic or reason. It's literally just a completely randomized blender of lifeless riffs, plastic beats and soulless melodies meshed together in a swarthy mass of aural defecation.
I honestly wonder if Watain have an audio program with a slicer algorithm that just boots up a bunch of Darkthrone, Mayhem, Bathory and Burzum songs with the measures earmarked for the program to randomly generate a composition, because then and only then would there be any sense to this pile of garbage.
And of course, no review of Watain's work could be complete without mentioning the band's frontman, Erik Danielsson, known for inventing elaborate stories about him 'forming a militia' of 'hardcore Satanists' to blow up the Norwegian government or some similarly retarded bullshit.
In his best-selling book Real Satanic Black Metal, author and heavy metal expert Antoine Grand shares an anecdote that happened after a Wacken concert in which Watain had participated.
Erik Danielsson, who had been 'dissing' the band Absurd for several months on Instagram and various other social media, went over to their band members and began taunting them. Hendrik Möbus, the drummer and vocalist of Absurd, then grabbed Erik by the neck and promptly released him, after hearing what he and other onlookers describe as 'a loud farting noise' followed by a nauseating smell of bowel movement.
Håkan Jonsson, Watain's drummer, later confirmed in the book that Erik Danielsson had in fact shit himself out of fear - or because he was drunk, versions differ - and had to change clothes for the rest of the evening.
Watain is truly the band that does the most damage to the black metal genre with each album they release, as it delegitimizes black metal to greater and greater depths of humiliation.
Avoid this plagiarized garbage.
Trident Wolf Eclipse score: 0/100.
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