Category: Audio Published on Thursday, 26 February 2009 00:00 Written by Graham Mills Hits: 134
9 After ‘Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk’ this certainly came as a shock to many Emperor fans, for this, ladies and gentlemen, is Emperor at their heaviest and most crushing! The opening track ‘Curse you all men’ is pure Morbid Angel worshipping evil, with fantastic guitar work from Ihsahn and Samoth and the annihilating drum battery of Trym, which leads the listener into a bloody trail of head banging madness! It shows that Emperor couldn’t give a shit about preparing the listener for what was to come; the listener is just shoved in at the deep end! Next comes ‘Decrystallizing Reason’ another great song with plenty of hooks to keep the listener amazed and interested and also sees a bit more atmosphere creeping in than on the opening track. The third song, ‘An elegy of Icaros’, is my least favourite song off the album (probably due to the intro), but saying that it isn’t that bad. It starts off with a nice string intro and then the guitars carry on the melody with Ihsahn singing over the top. After nearly a minute the whole thing speeds up and becomes a much better song with some tremendous guitar work! Track 4, ‘The source of Icon E’, starts off with a similar (if slower) riff to Angel of Death (!), then gets much faster with added King Diamond style vocals! A real metal song if there ever was one, fantastic! When ‘Sworn’ (Track 5) starts you just know that it will be a fucking holocaust of fucking metal! A song that rips you to shreds and then sits back and watches the video it made of you being torn limb from limb! Track 6, ‘ Nonus Aequilibrium’, is another assault on the senses, again with fantastic riffs, drums and vocals and with a great example of how to use synths properly in a fast black metal song! The further you get into this song the better it becomes! I felt Track 7, ‘The Warriors of Modern Death’, needed a paragraph of its own because it is that good! Basically I’ll put it simply: Do you like Bathory? You’d better do because that’s where this song takes its cues from; this song is destined for classic status! Track 8, ‘Of Blindness & Subsequent Seers’, is a little hard to get into but nonetheless makes a good listen. When it came out a lot of people slated this album for not being ‘Black Metal’ enough or even metal enough! Trust me, this is as metal as Emperor get! While not their best album, this album still gets a good 9/10!