In my observation, humans screw up on both sides of the Bell Curve: the dumb pound out repetitive emotions, and the intelligent do everything right like good A+ students according to what they see around them, making a repetition of what already exists.
On paper, Apotheosis is the perfect album and people like me should love it. Good concept, excellent grasp of black metal instrumentals, no jaunty rock-blues or maudlin-emo moods, great cover art… in fact, everything is perfect with only about five percent of a complete score remaining: this album is boring.
Symmetrical melodic riffs march up and down, gently rising and falling like the breathing of a sound sleeper. Songs break for riff exposition, then return to theme, but there is almost no conflict and thus direction to these pairs of riffs. This is an A+ take on what black metal is now, but that is a xerox of a photograph of a sketch of a silhouette, and retains nothing but aesthetics.
Tags: aethyrick, Black Metal
Excellent review.
Spot on. They don’t really do anything wrong but the music seems too safe and smoothed out: black metal your mom can listen to. With the non-threatening production, easy listening experience and lack of real interesting riffs, this is the approach lot of death/black metal bands appear to be adopting these days. Evident in the album art, lyrics, band image, etc, it’s a too-refined product, a kind of counterpoint to the jarring, graceless mashup of aesthetics found in nu-metal, metalcore and (most) industrial/metal: instead of shocking the listener, it coaxes with warm promises. The problem being, as mentioned above, that the music doesn’t maintain interest because it isn’t saying much. In contrast to metal/rap/industrial hybrid abominations, many of the people who make this “Smooth Metal” seem genuinely interested in the music, although they’re unable to create anything more than pale imitations due to a lacking any impetus beyond “let’s make some metal because we like it”, which is a fine starting point but not exactly a fire in your soul that demands expression.
Agreed. I think these guys are serious fans, and made music in tribute to the heroes of black metal, but without any more direction than that, it got a little sleepy.