Gorgoroth - Pentagram
Review: To produce an extremity powerful enough for the theatrical tendencies of black metal Gorgoroth introduced a minimalist style driven by responsive melodic peaks to its granular journey through simple blast-response beats at different paces from the funereal to the manic. Its brilliance is the precision of its scarce yet decisive placement of tone and the effect with which within songs the music vary for intensity and economical placement of information to outline the overarching image as a method preferable to pure repetition.
This concision comes with a price: as the elements are in essence few and often deliberately ridiculously simple and similar, at a first listen Gorgoroth seems oblivious: under the screeching voice of a cartoon character a sequence of charactered but seemingly unconnected riffs tell out a story of some kind. Existential tension is resolved in the realization of not narrative but meta-narrative: Gorgoroth have cloaked their postmodern deconstructionism in the camp and ultrathespian theatricalism of the fears of the past, and donning the mantle of evildoer have merited the title through sheer destructiveness toward normal music. Further aesthetic evidence toward this idea can be heard extremely faintly between songs, where some form of sample from an old movie or newsreel plays out music and haunting voices.
Where the beauty emerges is in the subconscious listening mind where a slowly growing appreciation for the song as an encompassing description of experience and not dogmatic conclusion gives significance to the altered details which beyond symbolism are a manipulation of metaphor, generating a sequence not unlike a strand of DNA: it decodes as it is created, and can only be read as instructions for generation and not a blueprint of the creature itself. All of this moves under a motif of pure blackmetal: the savage rockstar feralism in production and effects, the overblown incomprehensible and abrasive vocals in the upper registers, the pumping post-techno ambient drumbeats and surging tremelo-strummed riffs; the sin of Gorgoroth is the sign of its creation, which is a nihilism that accepts and revels in the "meaninglessness" of its world.