Gorgoroth - Incipit Satan (Black Metal)

Gorgoroth is a seemingly prolific band featuring a one time Zyklon-B band member, but that's before you realise the nature of their music: they're a queercore "orthodox black metal" band, surprisingly not from Sweden, but from Bergen of all places. It seems like something to be wary of considering the poor nature of the music produced by the so-called orthodox black metal scene at large, then you look at the inappropriate for black metal song titles such as "When Love Rages Wild in my Heart", and you get the picture.

Incipit Satan is "satanic" whine rock, not black metal. This is the style played in all of their discography, including the previous and utterly mediocre Under the Sign of Hell, except here, all pretence of black metal has been dropped aside in favour of the "haze of distorted instrumentation" production effect which is utilised in a manner more similar to a Suicide Silence record than anything remotely black metal. You can say the band found its true sound by dropping the extraneous black metal aesthetics that shouldn't have been attached to the whine rock in the first place, but the end product is just as vapid as before.

Front "man" Roger Tiegs, aka Inferanus, has his winning formula down: play 3 chord rock music using only harmonic minor chords in an incessantly repetitive verse-chorus drone, and add angry-man deathcore drums over it all while Gaahl's vocals float around somewhere in the background. He of course masks this in layers upon layers of distortion, but no amount of low-fi buzz can hide the fact that Incipit Satan is more Korn or Suicide Silence than Burzum - well, except for the stolen Burzum parts on "An Excerpt of X" that is.

The word Satan is all around the album, as are the homoerotic references to the relationship Inferanus entertains with his band members (Gaahl and King ov Hell), but the album Incipit Satan is very short on actual music. The whole thing is an easily assembled by-product haphazardly thrown together on protools, so it's really no surprise the band released so much when it all boils down to this (earlier material was more Korn-esque soft-heavy dynamic camouflaged as Graveland and Strid).

You can just imagine Inferanus bringing his guitar and amp to a Grindr date, covering lame ass radio rock in a haze of distortion but giving it a "black metal" flavour with shock-your-parents "satanic" lyrics and double bass rolling underneath, but here there isn't anything in the way of black metal outside of loud drums, harsh vocals and guitar distortion ("Litani til Satan" even sounds like the clean guitar intro of a Killswitch Engage song repeated for about 5 minutes).

The lyrics are also a main point of contention. At what point did black metal, or any metal for that matter, become about one sentence homoerotic love declarations? You have your cute "Unchain my Heart!!!" and other lyrical stinkers that would make even Dani Filth ill, all done for the purpose of blurring the lines between heavy metal and queercore of the worst kind.

Gorgoroth have, as a band, about as much of a message as Marilyn Manson does. Just angst-ridden drivel that sounds more like a 13 year old's attempt at goth poetry. This is whine rock with a different marketing slant (dressed up to appeal to Ulver and Shining fans). It fails even at being that competent by virtue of being so one dimensional and boringly predictable. Avoid this insult to black metal and your intelligence.

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