Dissection - The Somberlain (Black Metal)

Everything that ruined underground black metal and reduced it to gimmicky radio music can be found here. Angry verse vocals, stadium rock choruses, harmonic minor noodling, Pantera grooves, chugga chuggas... The only thing that makes Dissection's music metal is some of the guitar techniques they employ.

The worst part of it all is the band doing this under the pretence of being influenced by Norwegian black metal. I can tell you that there is nothing remotely resembling Burzum, Mayhem, Neraines, or even those stock standard Bathory riffs from Immortal's Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism to be found here. The Somberlain is 100% angsty radio rock dressed up to appear like it's saying something important while pretending it's black metal.

True to Swedish "orthodox" mallcore form, Dissection attempt to "upgrade" black metal's pagan and völkisch roots with some "theistic Satanism" or, as they call it, "anti-Cosmic Luciferianism" which is just a clever way to say that they believe in Father Jesus Satan. So expect the same Watain styled rap/rock rhyming lyrics about whiny emo crap such as "I could feel the dark embrace my soul", "For ages I have been searching for my bride" and "My existence, numb over orchards of grievance". Bravo, these are some lyrics that would make even Dani Filth recoil.

Dissection's brand of music is supposedly a mix between the melodic Swedish black metal of Bathory and the brutality of American death metal, namely Infester and Incantation, with some progressive and NWOBHM underpinnings. Of course the "br00tal" comes courtesy of imbecilic Roadrunner Records garbage like Machine Head and Slipknot, not death metal. The melodic aspects sound more like stolen sections from a Killswitch Engage album than anything Iron Maiden or Motörhead ever played. Progressive? There is nothing progressive on The Somberlain because it's just verse-chorus looping, proto-metalcore whine rock with emo crying for vocals and cheeseburger grooves for instrumentation: the by-product of the dying corpse of Sweden's metal scene circa post-Alf Svensson being violently sodomised Slaughter of the Soul style by baseball cap donning wiggers in Slipknot attire.

Dissection attempt to pass this off by adding pointless interludes in their ultra-simplistic songs to make people idiots think "wow, something is going on!", but they have absolutely nothing to say. Generic 1980s speed metal verse riffs with constipated tough guy vocals are interrupted by In Flames playing effete pop metal choruses with whining crybaby vocals in an attempt to rationalise the "angry" muzak that preceded it by playing inoffensive radio friendly diarrhoea that is ironically very fitting to the emo found in Dissection's lyrics. Spreading the meddle like their butt cheeks: now everyone can like "black metal" when the focus is really on foot-stomping stadium rock choruses that sound like Dimmu Borgir's interpretation of a Manowar riff.

This is pop rock elevator muzak with "trve kvlt black metal" dressing. The Somberlain is interchangeable with other Swedish mallcore and expresses nothing useful. Worse, thanks to this album other bands with even worse music were able to make a career by applying the formula found herein. Carcass, Soilwork, Arch Enemy and Nightrage took the simplified and artificially "bittersweet" riffing and sold millions. The first roots of metalcore can be traced to The Somberlain. Watain loved that bowel-movement riff on Black Horizons so much that that they released three albums trying to replicate it.

Dissection were claimed to be the "saviours" of black metal in the mid-90s, after the incarceration and dislocation of much of the Norwegian scene, but they were really the Judas Iscariots (not the band) of the genre. Ripping off genuine melodic metal bands like Bathory, Burzum, Sentenced and early At the Gates, while dumbing down their music so much that it could be the soundtrack of a homoerotic remake of any Disney classic, Dissection spearheaded the regression of black metal into emo/goth rock music. Grunge might've killed mainstream metal in the 90s, but Dissection did irrevocable damage to the underground as a whole. Every genre that metalheads love to hate (nu-metal, metalcore, deathcore, mellow deaf) owes a huge debt to Dissection. The Somberlain is the reason that a majority of people think that black metal must be for semi-literate basement-dwelling incel morons only.

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