Darkthrone - Plaguewielder
Review: After the limply completed Ravishing Grimness the remnants of Darkthrone attempted to focus energies for an album like their older material but, much as the songs they decided were too spacy for release until Goatlord, these stoner anthems are easily fashioned by masters for whom a series of cruising riffs and choruses almost ecclesiastically oblivious in benevolence are the work of an afternoon.
Seemingly dropped through permutations of standard form with well-patented technique, cuttings of riff tapes are visible here in some grand ideas that never get going. For later Darkthrone, this album represents the clearest statement since Total Death, yet clearly has an ambition of less intensity than the apocalyptic seizure of Transilvanian Hunger.