Watain - Casus Luciferi (Nu-Metal)

What happens if you dress up Papa Roach in lo-fi buzz-saw distortion and add black metal vocals? I don't know, because this isn't even as good as Papa Roach. It is, however, candy "heavy" metal with every third riff an AOR melodic transition but put into typical Norsecore packaging, including garage rehearsal production, wacky energetic drumming, and barfing deathcore vocals. But once you look below the surface, it's a power ballad.

The grab bag attitude of Ulver and Enslaved, who use the black metal tag to market non-metal products to the niche underground "black metal" scene because they would otherwise fail in the mainstream, rears its ugly head with this album Casus Luciferi. It further adds to the "black metal is like, whatever you want man!" and "yeah, metal, is like, no rules, like whatever!" attitude that was touted by grunge, metal's spiritual antithesis.

So, realising the genre has been cheapened by turds like Carcass and Opeth to be a garbage bin for populist failures, poor man's three-note punk musicians turn up the distortion and try to sell metalcore 101 CDs spiced up with "angry" vocals as "orthodox black metal" albums, and thus we are left with the Gorgoroths and Dimmu Borgirs of this world (or even worse, Watain). It's hard to blame them or "The True Mayhem" for not even trying when the majority of funderground beer metallers are so stupid if you slam random bits of "music" together and make it seem like something important is happening, via overly demonstrative playing, while calling it "orthodox black metal" to seem more "trve" to the clueless, people will buy into it.

Anyway, what we have here is the sound of older Swedish "black metal" crossbreeding itself back into rock music - incoherent noodling, groove rock influenced riffing and scream-a-long vocals over what is basic hardcore drumming. Fast, chaotic ear candy, basically. Indeed, when a self-styled black metal band's vocalist starts interjecting "Yeah!" and "Burn my flesh, thou light of lights!" into songs, you might as well say farewell to the genre. If you've heard pretty much any heavily hyped release by a Swedish "black metal" band to come out in the past several years, very little description should be necessary, because this thing's fecal fingerprints are all over what's currently passed off as "black metal".

Avoid this fecal failure Casus Luciferi unless you are into freezing your turds and using them as dildos while playing air guitar hero to Watain's geriatric Papa Roach emulation.

Back to the band Watain.