Review Summary: Anthems to the Times Before the Nightside Eclipse
Or something to that degree.
Despite being one of the most famous and influential bands in all of black metal, the quality of Dimmu Borgir's music has not necessarily been the most consistent throughout their two decade plus career. They've run the gamut from woefully underproduced, somewhat-lazily-performed-but-still-kinda-hypnotically-interesting melodic black metal on For All Tid and Stormblast, to overly grandiose, often ridiculously overproduced symphonic black metal on later releases like In Sorte Diaboli. A couple times we've even had those two avenues intersect on albums like Spiritual Black Dimensions and Abrahadabra, featuring crappy production and, in the latter's case, crappy music to boot. When Dimmu get it right though, then oh Satan do they ever get it right. An album like Enthrone Darkness Triumphant is the prime example of such a sentiment, as out of everything the band has ever done, all the great cuts like Allehelgens Død I Helveds Rike and Sympozium to the not so great ones like The Sacrilegious Scorn and The Demiurge Molecule, this is one of three albums by them, aside from Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia and Death Cult Armageddon, where they get it pretty much correct all the way through. Where this is surpassed by PEM and DCA, however, is that at least those albums have personalities all of their own. EDT, for all the enjoyable music found within, can't really make that same claim.
The best way to describe Enthrone Darkness Triumphant is that it's an album that technically works on most levels and contains some great songs and performances, but it perpetually reminds you of better albums from better bands. The albums that specifically come to mind in this instance are Emperor's legendary 1994 debut In the Nightside Eclipse, as well as their seminal 1997 release Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk (which ironically came out slightly over a month
after EDT, and Covenant's 1995 debut In Times Before the Light, which was helmed by contemporary Dimmu bassist Nagash and remains one of the most criminally underrated black metal albums of its day. You may be wondering why I'm not including Cradle of Filth's magnum opus Dusk... and Her Embrace in this list, and that's because outside of both bands playing symphonic black metal, neither band had much of anything musically in common at this point in their history. A convergence of sounds would occur later on down the line, but here, the most EDT and Dusk are alike is that both albums have keyboards, black metal riffs, some thrown-in guitar solos, and green album covers. As a whole, EDT plays like a toned down Anthems, with significant In Times and Nightside influences in the guitar and keyboard work. Much like Anthems was to Nightside, EDT shifts the primary focus of the music from the spacious atmosphere of the prior albums to dizzying guitar work (in theory, but not necessarily in execution, which I'll elaborate on later), only not quite as chaotic and retaining just a hair more of the vibe of the previous releases. The violence and chaos is still there, but it's a little more controlled, and thus, lacking some of the impact had the band just gone full bore into crazy riffing madness, which was rectified on the albums Dimmu released into the start of the new millennium. Songs like Mourning Palace, Entrance, and The Night Masquerade (which is so Covenant sounding that it might as well have been a track on In Times Before the Light) are more focused on the atmospheric side of the equation, with the more savage side of the band being unleashed throughout tracks such as Tormentor of Christian Souls, Master of Disharmony, and Relinquishment of Spirit and Flesh. It's about an even mixture right down the line, but I can't help but feel that the album would have been just that much better if they had stopped focusing on the "melodic" part of their genre label and paid a little bit more attention to the "black metal" aspect of things. As is, none of the songs really reach the heights they are reaching for. Nothing's less than good, per se, but it's just not as good as it wants to be.
The side effect, however, of holding the guitars back from going full on crazy rifftacular madness is that the keyboards pretty much force their way to the front of the stage and make you pay attention to them the most. Those with less sensibilities towards keyboards in extreme metal might be greatly annoyed by this, but as a sucker for music like this, I find the keyboard work on this album to be among the best in all of melodic/symphonic black metal. The real triumph of EDT is the imaginative, evocative, often beautifully haunting collection of soundscapes created by Stian Aarstad on every single song on the album. The man is a real master at knowing exactly what to play at the exactly right time, with the exactly correct sound for the part. Much like Ihsahn's key work in Emperor, he tends to stick to string synths most of the time, but he often varies it up with piano and dark choir, and while it isn't as varied in terms of instrument sounds used as something like Dusk and Her Embrace is, it is just the right combination of sounds mixed with Aarstad's technical flair for these particular songs on this particular album to work perfectly as is. The one issue here in that respect is that the keyboard work is so fantastic that it makes every other instrument feel lesser in comparison. Bass is audible but not really doing anything special, often just following along with whatever the guitars are doing, and while the drums are impressive in their bursts of blasting and double bass that are pretty much required for extreme metal, they aren't really doing anything that hasn't been heard on every other black metal album you've ever heard in your life. It would take another album for Tjodalv to put out a truly masterful performance on his instrument of choice. In the vocal department, this is the absolute best Shagrath has ever sounded, snarling, shrieking, and screaming with every bit of rage, hate, and anger you'd expect from a mid-to-late 90s black metal release. Former vocalist Silenoz focuses 100% on guitar here, the sole exception being the re-recording of Raabjørn speiler draugheimens skodde from the debut For All Tid, and he sounds great on there as well. Later albums from the band would see a sharp, significant decline in vocal quality, but for at least one album (and the album after it), the vocals were fantastic.
Enthrone Darkness Triumphant as a whole, while still entertaining in many respects and every song being equally enjoyable and engrossing, is greatly bogged down by existing too much in the shadows of the similar sounding, superior albums released in the months and years before and after it. Listening through the album again, it primarily reminded me of and made me want to listen to the three albums I referenced in the review title, which no piece of digestible media should ever do if it wants to stand out on its own. It's good in short spurts, but not in the context of an entire album where you're going "Hmm, it's fine, and not technically wrong at all, but I just want to listen to Anthems again". As a stepping stone to the future, however, it serves much more effectively. As the band would later come into their own in the early 2000s with the fantastic Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia and Death Cult Armageddon, the musical successes of those albums would only further serve to highlight that EDT, while wanting to be a legendary black metal album musically, just isn't that. It's still really good, don't get me wrong, and the music found within served as a foundation for the triumphs the band would put forth just a few years later, but it's just not
as good as it could have been, or as good as its contemporaries and the albums that came after it. But it is the album that brought Dimmu Borgir to the dance, and it must always be recognized as that.
