Review Summary: Running away from what they're good at
As it pertains to black metal, Dimmu Borgir are probably the biggest band to ever come out of that style in terms of mainstream notability aside from Cradle of Filth. To many, one of those two bands are what they immediately think of when the genre comes to mind. Obviously the black metal faithful are just THRILLED with that being the case, but if you look back through their (admittedly inconsistent) library, you'll find some legitimately great stuff throughout. From the underproduced beginnings of For All Tid and Stormblast, to the Emperor-lite trappings of Enthrone Darkness Triumphant and Spiritual Black Dimensions, and, of course, the groundbreaking peaks of excellence that were Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia and Death Cult Armageddon, Dimmu for many years created great, sometimes incredible, music that paved the way for much of the symphonic metal landscape of today. However, they appeared to hit a wall after the re-recording of Stormblast in 2005, releasing the middling In Sorte Diaboli and the often-outright-bad Abrahadabra afterwards. Then they took a break. A long, some would say needed, eight year break. There are children who were born the year Abrahadabra came out that are now nearing the end of elementary school. Barack Obama wasn't even halfway through his first term yet when that album was released. I personally was still in high school at the time of Abrahadabra. Much can happen in eight years, and the diehard fans of the band I'm sure were hoping that in their absence, Dimmu's creative juices had been refilled and they would put out something on the level of their previous best material again. The band certainly made it seem that way in promotional press, to the point of claiming that some of the music on this new album they were doing would date back to 1993, the year of their founding and before they actually released anything. Others figured it would be an Illud Divinum Insanus situation, where the new album is hyped to hell before release, only to be revealed as a total stinkaroo upon first listen. What we have here with Eonian is kind of an uneven mix of the two, where parts of the album are absolutely phenomenal and, at times, on the level of the band's best material of the past. Most of the time, though, we're stuck with an uneven, unfocused, mostly uninteresting album that relies on its worst element way too much, leading to an inconsistent, disappointing experience.
I really don't care that Dimmu Borgir are trying to position themselves as being past black metal at this point. That much has been certain for an increasing number of years, most obviously since Abrahadabra's release in 2010. It's their band, and if they want to try and move past what they used to do, then more power to them. What I do care about is that this mentality of theirs is actively harming their music, and this is quite noticeable throughout this album. Attempts at "progression" on their part fall completely flat on Eonian, and without question, the best parts of the album are the parts where they lapse back into the hyperfast, pummeling black metal that they used to be able to mix so well with lush, sweeping symphonies. It's quite ironic to me that a band so concerned with appearing to be beyond what they used to be, to the point that they said in the documentary on the Forces of the Northern Night DVD that they were not interested in being a black metal band anymore, is best when they go back to what they used to do. When this extends to full songs like The Empyrean Phoenix and Alpha Aeon Omega, then we finally get a taste of what this album could have been had what the band claimed it to be were true. Even the orchestra of songs like these are better, fitting in and meshing with the music better than pretty much everything else that isn't Interdimensional Summit, a song which has the distinction alongside Rite of Passage of being the only non-black metal songs on the album that are enjoyable and fun all the way through. It helps too that the orchestra on Eonian is significantly scaled back from where it was on Abrahadabra, more in line with something like Death Cult Armageddon in terms of allowing the guitars to breathe and not suffocating everything else under its weight.
Most every other song on Eonian has a severe focus issue, never really knowing what to do and just kinda jumping along doing whatever with no real idea of where to go next. Songs like The Unveiling, Council of Wolves and Snakes, and I Am Sovereign (which, by the way, has an incredibly ridiculous part about 2 minutes in which feels like a drunken, jaunty pirate jig, and it's one of the most entertaining parts of the entire album) feel like overly long mish-mashes of several different song pieces that were just kinda copy/pasted into one, and the vibe of each song wildly shifts throughout from slow & plodding to token black metal speed, with no real regard for properly transitioning from one section to another. I Am Sovereign in particular has such an awkward shift into its final, double bass-filled section that it feels like it's being played in slow motion. If they just honed in on the fast stuff and kept it that way, this would be a much better album by default. A few songs feel like holdovers from Abrahadabra, primarily Aetheric, Lightbringer, and Archaic Correspondance, to varying results; Aetheric is a complete in-one-ear-out-the-other bore, Lightbringer is pretty much Born Treacherous part 2 with less sensible measure transitions, badass intro-and-outro riffs, and a verse riff that feels ripped straight out of the Enthrone Darkness Triumphant songbook, and Archaic Correspondence keeps stop-starting all the way through, interrupting the flow of the song and just bugging me greatly (it also has the best "No ***, Sherlock" lyric I've heard in a metal song in my life with, "Life is a trial and the passage is death". To reiterate, no ***, Sherlock). Again, if they had worked more on tightening up the transitions and focused more on the fast parts of songs, this would automatically be a better album.
Nothing, however, could fix the major issue of Eonian, save for cutting it out by, like, 90%, that being the horribly overused choir. Remember on Abrahadabra how the choir in songs like Dimmu Borgir and Born Treacherous was utilized sparingly and only in places that made sense to put it? Yeah, that doesn't happen here. Clearly Shagrath and his merry band of face painted, lacking-in-hair compadres took more from how the choirs were implemented on the two shows featured on Forces of the Northern Night, where the choir stood in for the absent (and greatly missed) ICS Vortex, taking over clean vocals whenever a song called for them. Then they decided to change "whenever a song called for them" to "whenever we feel like it", and almost every song suffers greatly for it. Whenever a big, extended choir sing-along spot comes in, the music stops dead in its tracks loses all momentum, only regaining said momentum once they shut up. Lightbringer and I Am Sovereign are particularly harmed by this, as they would have been on the level of The Empyrean Phoenix had the choir been less of a factor in their composition. As is, they're good songs with a great song hidden within, waiting to be unveiled if only the goddamn choir would just stop being a thing. They also can make a bad song worse, as is the case with Council of Wolves and Snakes, whose irritating stop-start composition is only further exacerbated by yet more ***ing omnipotent Disney choir. There are times where the choir does work, entirely because they're put in places where it makes sense to have them there, like, ironically, the ending of I Am Sovereign (which goes back to the inconsistency issues mentioned earlier), their appearance in the middle of The Empyrean Phoenix, and the whole of Interdimensional Summit. These are the exceptions to the rule though, and the rule is "Choir on Eonian = Severe zoning out". It's a total crutch to try and hide the less-than-stellar songwriting, and the majority of the time, it just doesn't work. To quote my review notes, "I want this choir to go the *** away forever".
In terms of production quality, this is just as big and bombastic and polished and flashy as you would expect a Dimmu Borgir album to be, like anyone would expect any differently of a major label release in 2018, let alone a Dimmu release. It's certainly better mixed than Abrahadabra or In Sorte Diaboli were, the former being a strange, muddy slather of all the band instruments running into each other while simultaneously being overpowered by the orchestra, and the latter being a paper thin, overly loud mess of distortion and bad guitar tones. Eonian takes more after Death Cult Armageddon, meaning that everything is perfectly level with one another and at exactly the right volume. Even the bass is audible through most of the album. The drums sound a bit more polished and less natural than they did on Abrahadabra, which fits this album's production better, but it's a shame that the drum parts here are pretty basic and kinda boring. One of Dimmu's strong points forever has been phenomenal drumming throughout the years, and this is easily the least interesting drumming an album of theirs has had since the original Stormblast. I can't imagine Daray wrote these parts himself, as is evidenced by his own band Vesania and even the drumming on Abrahadabra. Shagrath is still frog croaking away, somehow being both more and less legible than your typical black metal vocalist at the same time (although one line in I Am Sovereign where it sounds like he's saying "Pain is wanting lotion" fills me with much amusement), and you'll either be able to tolerate him or outright detest him, much like Eonian as an album. To me, it's an incredibly inconsistent record that wants so hard to be something else but is only really great at the thing it's trying to not be, while at the same time being so dragged down by an over-reliance on extended choir passages, easily the worst part of the album, that it makes the better songs less good and the bad songs even worse. As stated earlier, the album is only really firing on all cylinders when the band embraces their black metal past and storms forward in that direction. It's a damn shame that's not most of the album, then.
