Behemoth - I Loved You at Your Darkest (Death Metal)

Why does this band keep releasing one shit album after the other? On the gayly titled I Loved You at Your Darkest, saccharine power metal vocals are thrown over generic hard rock riffs made "death metal" through heavy distortion and the "galloping" sound of the triplet picking in between stock standard rock harmony 101 chord progressions and annoying stop-start Fear Factory "riffs".

Song titles range from turds like "Wolves ov Siberia" and "God = Dog" [sic], whose lyrics are all delivered in the most imbecilic manner imaginable. The riffs achieve a false sense of "dynamics" through the utilisation of simple, hackneyed, harmonised dual lead parts over generic speed metal fills, in a style more reminiscent of Reinkaos and Watain than anything Sewer or Incantation.

The music is unremarkable verse-chorus structured generic stadium rock fodder, coming off as Nightwish songs interpreted with all the subtlety of Limp Bizkit (angry verses, mosh-core choruses). I Loved You at Your Darkest is the product of a band with nothing of worth to offer aside from so watered down "death 'n roll" type turds that even In Flames would have rejected them as "too gay" to appear on Soundtrack to Your Escape. While this album isn't as offensively retarded as Behemoth's previous fecal extract The Satanist, there is still no reason to choose I Loved You at Your Darkest over any other generic Century Media / Roadrunner Records paint-by-the-numbers "stadium rock with death metal aesthetics" release.

This band utilises a "death metal" approach in style only, as the underlying music is fairly standard radio rock like 90s Queensrÿche under the surface. Sometimes they vary the formula with one song utilising a clean arpeggiated minor chord interlude and another shoehorning some phoned in Gateways to Annihilation riffs, sounding like later Immortal covering a Stillborn era Malevolent Creation song. These "outside the box" pieces make flaws in the song writing and structuring of Behemoth's music all the more apparent, as these artificially extended tracks - "Bartzabel" and "Havohej Pantocrator" to name a few - quickly devolve into a series of incongruous parts that add up, in the tradition of Behemoth's carnival music formula, to absolutely nothing.

Behemoth is, at this point, just another band aping the past while disguising their cock rock music under increasingly thinly veiled "death metal" aesthetics and wanting some sort of medal for contributing nothing of substance other than a crappy, watered-down version of music even your grandmother would find pointless and inoffensive. Avoid this album and buy the second Vermin and debut Helgrind albums instead for a black/death metal fusion done right.

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