Cirith Gorgor try to apply the technical musicianship of the best death metal to black metal as Demonaz did on Immortal‘s heavily Morbid Angel influenced last gasp, Blizzard Beasts. However Cirith Gorgor’s songwriting on Bi Den Dode Hant cannot even hope to approach the level of the Norwegian greats and best death metal bands of the early nineties; Cirith Gorgor sound more like Hate Eternal or any other generic rock band recorded by Erik Rutan‘s Klingon forehead trying to be Mayhem as black metal is cool with the kiddies now due to them reading on Facebook that Varg stabbed Euronymous in the face over twenty years ago.
Cirith Gorgor’s song structures are strictly rock influenced sing-alongs rather than riff mazes or truly being riff driven like heavy metal. They even use acoustic intros, codas, and bridges like Led Zeppelin if Led Zeppelin shopped at Hot Topic. This strict progressive rock structure puts most of the songs on Bi Den Dode Hant in the camp of black/death ‘n’ roll more than actually belonging to the metal genre. Cirith Gorgor’s rock songs aren’t even on the more classical influenced camp of prog like Yes, King Crimson, and half of Iron Maiden‘s material with Paul Di’Anno. Cirith Gorgor play the more, random sort of Rush-like technical instrumental masturbation as progressive rock. As such Bi Den Dode Hant crashes and burns as metal; it will appeal to no one except for Rush fans who happen to have a few Darkthrone records in their collection.
Tags: bi den dode hant, black 'n roll, cirith gorgor, death 'n' roll, EP, hammerheart records, progressive rock, review, techdeaf, the netherlands, wanking
This was a good band once. If you were kicking about in the 90s, chances are you would have come across Onwards to the Spectral Defile. Not A-tier but honest enough.
Wow, this is heavy. I gave it a listen both via your post and over at their website. There’s a lot of talent in that guitarist.
It’s quite obvious those are just discarded tracks from ‘Visions of Exalted Lucifer’, which was way better than this. I don’t see the point in releasing half-formed material of this sort, but maybe the band needed some cash and that was the best idea they came up with. Anyway, they did a solid live performance when I saw them three months ago in Berlin alongside Angelcorpse and a Polish mishmash by the name of The Committee.