The Abyss is a now-defunct Hypocrisy side project. The original trio (Peter Tagtgren, Mikael Hedlund, and Lars Szoke) decided to make some black metal right after releasing The Fourth Dimension under Hypocrisy, and it concluded with varying results. This could be due to the band completely switching places instrumentally; Peter does drums and backing vocals, Mikael does guitar and vocals, and Lars does guitar, and somehow it doesn’t end up being the disaster it could’ve been.
With that said, this isn’t the most innovative record. Maybe it was just made for fun, but either way it sticks to many stereotypes (tempos ranging between 10 bpm, a myriad of blast beats, tremolo riffs followed by slow chords) and doesn’t really change from that ideology much, aside from the last two tracks. It all starts to meld together after a while, though there is one thing that makes it interesting. The future sci-fi atmosphere of Hypocrisy could have easily been born here. A lot of the songs brood on the embryo of that atmosphere, which is interesting to witness.
One thing that doesn’t help in the album’s tedious structure is the vocals. They sound like Marduk, but fortunately less intelligible, but if you don’t know who Marduk is the vocals sound unnecessarily high pitched and weak. The lyrics are the general “HAIL SATAN giggle” but I found if you use this as backround music you won’t notice. The riffs are usually just as simple minded as any Darkthrone track but less inspired. However! A large exception to this is the second track, Tjänare Af Besten. Near the second half of the song, it strips down from its excitingly valiant mantra to a slow clean guitar break that builds on itself with bleak, harmonized guitars and crushes into a fist pumping section that fades out. They should have definitely built upon that, because it could’ve been something really interesting.
From the get-go, you can tell Peter is a better drummer than Lars ever was. You can hear he’s playing his parts effortlessly and his performance makes for the highlight of the whole album. Sorgens Dal would not have been the solid mid tempo monster it is without Peter’s simple, but effective drumming. Aside from that, he switches things up enough to maintain attention, but everything as a whole just doesn’t measure up to much.
Because this is their first venture into the genre, a lot of the missteps can be accounted for (especially because the next record is a lot better), plus they added a mind-bending ambient track at the end that probably brought the album’s rating up. Regardless of the conventional style, it was still necessary for the evolution of Hypocrisy’s sound, so it wasn’t a waste of time. The album was re-issued by Nuclear Blast in 2001 with the second album, Summon the Beast, on a single digipack, so if you’re interested in a black metal Hypocrisy, it’s a great opportunity to get both albums at once. It's ok to enjoy mindless black metal guys, just don't expect a blue ribbon winner.
