Veles - The Black Ravens Flew Again
Review: To prove that a band can come back to fail (as if we lacked reminders in that department) Veles create a contemporary black metal album that updates their quasi-competent mystical style with a slicker melodic version, which for those with experience means they have become cheerleaders for the past with a style that is current but directionless in its desire to throw every possible type of riff and structure into the pot for a shotgun blast approach toward profundity: unsure of where to take a genre that has now become accepted and thus cannot delight in the forbidden fruits of occultism, amoralism and nationalism, they have rehashed what old ideas resemble to them now using the greater instrumental competence and more standard approach to songwriting inherited from more successful rock and metal bands.
Songs fit together from a handful of three note/symmetrical opposition diminished minor key harmonization riffs which unite through the interlocking dependency of different tempos; it's an elaboration on the verse/chorus device known to radio listeners. "We Chopped by Swords" borrows a note-different riff from Behemoth's "Thy Winter Kingdom," and parts of other songs trigger memories of past glories of the flowing melodic style of black metal from Poland, but like a bad clone of Malevolent Creation or an East Coast Metalcore band, Veles throw the whole thing together like an omelette and wrap it up with rhythm, which makes for music that at first seems refreshing but upon contemplation appears as empty as radio rock.
Maybe someday metal bands will learn that it is better to fade away with a reputation for quality than to burn out by following the same apish, predictable, humble, sycophantic path that every other moron does in modern society, and thus to disgust those who once imagined a vivacious tenacity for insight into existence lurked within their souls. With this latest album, Veles have done their part for world destruction -- by giving us a thousand copies of plastic junk destined for near-immediate landfill filing. The term "tool" could be used descriptively here.