By the time of “Total Death” the original guitarist Zephyrous has already left the band and there are only Nocturno Culto and Fenriz reminiscing of the past times and playing “black metal” in a routinated and dry manner. Maybe they would agree on this themselves, maybe not, but I believe that they were disappointed in how “Svarte Sirkel”’s anti-christian terrorism was stopped by a couple of jailings and already at the time of this album the general image of Norwegian black metal scene started resembling that of the Swedish death metal one for which the genre was born to be an antithesis to.

Listening to this album now, I can hear something true in it because I haven’t been able to avoid desecrating my ears with 100 times more useless things, but I can still see them glaring with neon letters on this album: lack of interest and general boredom.

At this time Fenriz had been involved in ten different albums released within one year and this shows us that he maybe could/should have left something out. This sounds like “safe and regular DARKTHRONE”, some might even consider that a point in favor of this album.

© 2000 black hate