Emperor are currently preparing to tour in celebration of the twentieth anniversary their second album, the third rate Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk. While Emperor kept on wearing armor, Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk saw Emperor simplify their trademark complex, almost symphonic Norwegian black metal sound down to two to three note speed metal influenced riffs with neo-classical wank leads in conventional verse-chorus-verse heavy metal songs to appeal to a wider, Wacken-going audience.
Even casual fans of the band well-versed in death or black metal could tell something went severely wrong in Emperor’s compositional process in 1997. Ihsahn rasped during the verses and suddenly switch to clean singing in the choruses to highlight the dichotomy between the two as in Pantera, Opeth, and the rap-rock commonly referred to as “nu-metal”. This echoes the random choral modulations into a major key of hooked-based pop music and lame power metal for men with testicular torsions that caused a less than normal amount of testosterone to be released during puberty, emasculating them into modern liberals and hippies.
Samoth‘s trademark flowing and rapidly shifting riffing style present on Emperor, In the Nightside Eclipse, and Blood Must be Shed was totally gone. In it’s place was a poor approximation of “Norwegian black metal” riffing as invented by Snorre Ruch from Thorns. The riffs resembled something that would be played by a lame American speed metal band convinced by their label or management to try to play “black metal” in the mid to late nineties as everything with corpse paint on the back was moving thousands of forgettable CDs through distros to black metal fans hungry for more after the all the Norwegians but Immortal hit a brick wall creatively around 1995.
Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk‘s song structures bastardized the heavy metal and progressive rock hybrid that Iron Maiden was playing on Somewhere in Time and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. Emperor suddenly was Iron Maiden gone prog dumbed down to reach every drunk half blacked out in a stadium. The viral hymns to Sauron and Satan would come no more; Emperor had gone “symphonic” power metal. Now Emperor are about to play power metal for a power metal audience. Opening will of course be with metalcore and power metal bands playing drunken singalongs so saccharine, they make Blind Guardian seem like Slayer. Stay far, far away.
Tags: anniversary, anthems to the welkin at dusk, cash grab, emperor, festivals, lame metal, power metal, pseudo-prog, pseudo-progressive, sell-out, upcoming tours
Everyone loved this album back in the 90s.
I like how one of the gushing larm reviews has an addendum edited in that the album isn’t as good as he remembers. https://www.deathmetal.org/etc/larm/0100/0183.html
Seems to be the universal Anthems… experience.
Sigh.
I know they won’t play CT but I’ll say it anyways, THEY BETTER PLAY CONNECTICUT!
The two closest venues outside this hellhole would be in NYC & Worcester, thats hundreds in gas, food, parking, unwarranted harassment/tickets from cops, having to travel unarmed because both states suck, blah blah. All for one show.
Maybe just getting close to 36 has made me an asshole that complains too much about everything. I hate everything.
Oh yea, no Samoth if there’s a US tour.
Time to put this geriatric down and feed the remains to the larvae. There`s not much life left in this one anyway.
“Mid-30s” is about the right time for what people call usually call »midlife crisis«: The world is fucked. It’s not going to change fundamentally any time soon. Additionally, more and more fondly remembered things disappear or end up being fubarred after a long sequences of seemingly innocent changes. All kinds of strange new stuff turns up but nothing seems even remotely as good as what got replaced. And then, there’s of course the realization that this will now go on for another 30 – 40 years filled with repetitive activities while the world keeps crumbling and the best one can hope for is to die quickly and without much pain. This is amplified by popular (non-)culture, presumably more so on the USA, which celebrates “youth” as The ideal state of affairs and basically tries to portray everyone over fourty as walking corpse which didn’t yet fall down (Here are some products to help you, BTW).
I remember feeling somewhat like this 10 years ago -). But this is really all bullshit. The people who make “consumer culture” claim to celebrate youth but what they really want is sell loads crap to uncritical customers, these being uncritical because they’re clueless aka ‘young’ (When I was 20, I knew everything. But my world was very small compared to now). They try to keep this mentally incapacitation alive as hard as possible as people get older because it helps selling goods of little real value. The only other option except “get old” is “die young”. Nobody wants that, either.
Unhappy and perpetually angry couch potatoes are perfect customers for snake oil salesmen peddling fictional remedies for a disease they invented for this purpose. This sounds like a day trip. I’ll be having one on Saturday with the additional complication that I’ll have to get up insanely early and travel by train and underground. Which means being among people for all of the day, something I absolutely loathe. I expect that there may be a few tolerable people at the concert but most of them are bound to be the exact same kind of assholes one meets everywhere, just differently costumed (note to Mr Saul: the chance that I’d voluntarily associate with any group you [or anyone] would be a member of are zero. Not all people suck. But ‘not suck people’ are so few and far between that I stopped looking for them years ago. Made my life much happier). I’ll have to eat expensive junk food all day, drink shitty beer sold at inflated prices, hate the co-headliner and don’t think I will like the headline much better in pratice.
Very much looking forward to it.
I felt like that when I was a teenager. Depression is one hell of a drug… now I kinda miss it, being able to just sit in my room and ruminate in melancholia for days, even weeks. Depressing, aint it?
Hmm … sorry, but depressions are total shit and not at all related to teenager self pity. If you never encounter a real one, consider yourself lucky: They kill quite a few people, especially men.
Don’t be so melodramatic, perhaps the opportunity just never arose. Contemplating suicide is a fun daily activity non the less.
You’re confusing »melodramatic« with »accurately reporting a fact;« (which can be considered dramatic in itself, but that’s not my fault),
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/world-suicide-prevention-day-men-emotions-childhood-biggest-killer-in-uk-under-45-a7235766.html
and your “oh those teenage years … one hell of a drug” comment was just out-of-place: An acute depression is no more enjoyable than prolonged, seriously strong pain. Both are ‘feelings’ capable of rendering a person completely immobilized. Not that I wrote anything about ‘depression’ or ‘melancholia’ to begin with, that was just another accurate presentation of something, although maybe seen from an unusually-seeming angle: The world is fucked. That’s not a lament, just a statement.
Those that successfully forfeit from existence should be applauded, not pittied. Depression can be as painful as pain itself, which is just a stimulation of the nerves. The weak should just stick to weed and alcohol… and Tylenol.
People making senseless noises during funerals in order to draw attention to themselves should be immediately attended to.
But is the grave big enough?
Fatalism is no comfort; the recognition that change is inbound and that we can encourage it, however, is fulfilling.
How old are you?
2old2cold
One year older than Vikernes, IOW, “Onwards to 45!”. People haven’t quite stopped asking for my ID to prove that I’m really 18 already yet, at least not in bad light. Probably not an issue for him.