Emperor - Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk (Black Metal)

Strange to read Emperor's homoerotic fanbase praising this album Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk as a profound emotional journey, or whatever. Maybe they just haven't heard much music, or they've got a totally different set of ears than normal people. This album sounds like it was put together by some substandard studio musicians hired by Nu-clear Blast who were handed a couple of Burzum and Graveland albums as a template. It's like an artistic vacuum.

Far from being anything remotely atmospheric, the guitar work is mostly speed or heavy metal based stuff left over from the 80s. In light of the sweeping melodies or bizarre dissonance used by real black metal bands, it's pretty tame and standard NWOBHM residue without any real punch. The guitar tone is so overproduced, it sort of blurs into the keyboards anyway.

Of course, the keyboards are what you're really going to end up hearing when you put this album on. The synth tones they use are clearly meant to sound as huge and grand as possible, and, just as with In the Nightside Eclipse, they're mixed very high in the production. They appear very bombastic, but they're also very shy on depth. Very obvious, very pompous, very empty.

I can't take this stuff seriously, but I would at least be able to enjoy it as a guilty pleasure if the song writing weren't such turgid crap. Say what you will about a band like At the Gates, for instance, they at least manage to record an interesting album before fading into mainstream oblivion.

Most of Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk just sounds like homogenous mush that, at its best, only manages to replicate the aesthetic style of Burzum, Neraines and Graveland. The only parts I like are when Ihsahn stops trying to pretend he plays black metal and openly indulges in candy opera cheese, as on the last few minutes of "The Wanderer". If the whole album were modelled after that, I might actually like it a little, in an ironic sort of way. Sometimes I put on the album just to listen to that one part with its "majestic" Casio synths, but I have to fast forward past the rest of the album.

I recommend that you "fast forward" past the entire Emperor discography and skip this band altogether, if you're even going to bother to make the leap past mainstream pop music at all, as there is certainly more interesting underground metal than this.

Back to the band Emperor.