Review Summary: Solefail of epic proportions.
The name of the album should make you laugh;
Black for Death: An Icelandic Odyssey, Pt. 2. The concept should make you laugh harder; extremely cheesy Viking Mythology. The music should make you pee your pants with a howl; black metal/ symphonic/ folk/ gothic/ jazzy/ progressive/ Viking metal. I don’t feel I need to go into much more detail about how this abysmal sack of poo needs justification of the rating if you read the intro, but a humourous run-through is in order as to why this is as terrible as albums like
Cold Lake and
St. Anger. Actually, scratch that last statement. Celtic Frost and Metallica began their career with genre-shaping albums while Solefald somehow managed to put out a critically acclaimed metal smorgasbord
The Linear Scaffold (which it clearly is NOT due to it’s underachieving masturbatory plagiarism of Dimmu Borgir and all things ridiculous about the sub-genre).
Black for Death is no different in its approach where its ideas are so far stretched over the map that the album ends up becoming a comedy fest of sorts. To clearly outline this, let me give you a quick track-by-track of how the album pans out.
Track 1 –
Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia worship with some tasteless symphonics/ violins (via
Death Cult Armageddon) and utterly weak screeches/ growls that sounds like I need to skip this track.
Track 2 - Some terrible melancholy folky vocals, more symphonic Borgir love followed by some Borknagar riffage and some awful goat-with-laryngitis vocals.
Track 3 – Evil dwarf emerges from hut with creepy voice and some simple riffage.
Track 4 – Nightclub-jazzy instrumental…what?
Track 5 - Simplistic stutter-stop open chord riff with some more goat-raping vocals, terrible cry-out-in-the-mountain vocals….blah.
Track 6- Their best attempt at Dimmu worshipping with a number of generic riffs, but hey, they came close to tweaking my interest.
Track 7 – Some native tongue spoken stuff that you might here by pressing a display info button at your local Native Amercian Museum.
Track 8 – Frolicking folky/ Viking intro that leads into another tedious…wait a minute, Trickster from Ulver is there to save the song from it’s tedious, wait a minute…nah the song still sounds like symphonic suckage.
I think you get it by now…
At this point, you’re probably sitting there saying that I’m being unfair, that anybody can sit and criticize music the way I have above. Heck, you’re probably sitting there getting after me for name-dropping Dimmu Borgir way too much in this review. To be quite honest, give this album a listen and you will do the same thing; it’s just that bad and the copy-cat antics make it unbearable (especially ripping off Dimmu Borgir to no end). I’m all for being ambitious with ideas that make sense and Solefald are really good at not doing this. Concept albums are supposed to have a running theme throughout the music (look at
Crimson by Edge of Sanity for a wonderful example of this).
Black for Death’s failure lies in the songs lose ends that tie nothing together and thus, losing any reason as to why I should pay attention to the story that might be going on throughout the lyrics (whatever that may be). In short, don’t waste your time with this album/ band, even if your elite black metal/ symphonic/ folk/ gothic/ jazzy/ progressive/ Viking metal buddies on the internet told you otherwise.
