It sucks, but… – 25%
Abominatrix, June 14th, 2018
Written based on this version: 1994, CD, Adipocere Records
Metal music, and black metal in particular, was in a very different place back in 1994. This was close to three years before your humble narrator knew a thing about this particular underground phenomenon. Oh yes, the famous Norwegian fiascoes had already taken place; the Polish “NSBM” scene was in full swing; Czech and Mediterranean bands were already doing novel and striking things with the genre, but most of North America was completely oblivious to all this. We’d just barely gotten used to the idea that death metal could have “iron maiden guitars” in it! The Internet, though an exciting place for those who had the skills, was barely alive. If you heard about black metal at all, it was in a hushed whisper, or maybe a dubbed tape that arrived in the mail and took months to get to you. Bands that are lauded today by Rolling Stone magazine, of all fucking things, were seldom discussed and among very few, and when they were brought up, it was usually with a degree of derision and scorn. “The bands couldn’t play,” they said, “they were all produced in a toilet bowl and only doing this to shock their mums”.
But over in Europe, something weird was happening. Hard as it is to believe, now, in ’94/’95, some of the “die-hards” were already proclaiming the death of black metal. Cradle of Filth had released their first album, some kids had read some weird stuff about Norway in a magazine somewhere, and all bets were off. Artists were starting to proliferate. Death metal bands were growing corpse-paint over-night and giving their vocalists helium injections so they could get in on this new thing. It became a marketing ploy, even in this niche, that a certain demographic would probably buy anything with the “black metal” tag associated with it.
Now, lest you all mistake me, I’m not really a cynical person about all this stuff. I came in at the tail end of it all, and a lot of what I observed had already happened a couple of years previously. I don’t really think black metal suffered the same kind of blow that punk arguably did in the 1980s. I don’t care about Cradle of Filth or what piddling one-off bands were signed by what label in 1994. I just want to illustrate that what we were seeing here was indeed an attempt to market black metal in a somewhat serious fashion. There were a lot of gems in the scene in 1994, but some metal labels were signing what seems in retrospect some kind of obvious crap, and they did it, sometimes, without much sense of discernment or quality control. Nowadays, any teen in a bedroom with a guitar and some cables and software can do this. He might even be really good at promoting his own stuff. He might, if he’s lucky, be signed to a label willing to print his music in a limited run and provide some distribution. But it’s not 1994 anymore; you can’t just slap some guitars on some keyboards and add in some distressed duck noises and call it black metal and leave the rest to Adipocere Records.
Ah, you wondered when I’d get around to Daemonium, didn’t you? Adipocere was not a huge label, but they did have some decent distribution and I think I remember seeing a couple of their titles in a local store in early 97, when I really started looking, for very high prices. Now, let’s talk about numbers. It says here on the album’s mA page that it had a pressing of 12,000 copies. Does that number seem high to you, or low? Although I admit to not having concrete data at my fingertips, I want to try and put this into some relative perspective, for those who might think 12,000 a low number: When it was released in the same year (1994), Cradle of Filth’s The principle of Evil made Flesh, was, I believe, printed in 30,000 units. Please note that I don’t know this as a certainty, so anyone who knows otherwise can feel free to mail me a correct figure, but this was a number I saw quoted by Dani or someone else affiliated with the band not long afterwards. Now, obviously, Cradle of Filth did really well for themselves; that album ended up in demand and reprinted several times and the band probably went on to sell ten or more times as many copies with each subsequent record. But the point is, it’s expensive to print albums, on any professional format. Unless you think you’re going to at least sell most of your units within a reasonable amount of time, you just don’t want to print too many, or else you, the prospective label boss, have not only lost money, but have an embarrassing pile of Cds lying around the house somewhere that they can’t even pay anyone to get rid of. Others may have different opinions of course, but I know plenty of good bands who just couldn’t manage to sell 12,000 copies of their album even if you gave them ten years. If that sounds incredible, just think of what a niche market this underground metal thing really is: So many bands; so many fans also being musicians with their own things to push. The scene is bigger now than it was in 1994, but that doesn’t make it any easier for anyone.
Case in point, Dark Opera of the Ancient War Spirit. What is this thing? It’s pompous, overblown, has delusions of grandeur and is really bad. The kindest thing I could say about it, aside from noting that a few of the individual parts within the nine “acts” of this “opera” offer some brief seconds of momentary intrigue, is that it is a bit like Master’s Hammer’s The jilemnice Occultist on a dose of zolpidem. If you compose yourself, and try to ignore the objective qualities of the thing, while trying to imagine what great feats of magick and mayhem were in the mind of creator Lord A. V. Daemonium while making this, it almost works as a collection of sounds pictures or images. That form in the mind of the listener. The opening is fine, composed of low foreboding synth rumbles and sounds suggestive of something threatening in an evening glade. Hateful voices chant an invocation to something terrible while percussion frantically beats in the background. The tension mounts to a frenzied pitch – and then – well, nothing, really. Despite everything being a single twenty-six minute piece of music, indeed, as the progenitor insists, an “opera”, there are no real segues between the movements to speak of, so there’s just a lengthy silence, and finally, a buzzing, non-descript guitar creeps in with a crap tone playing something that vaguely approximates someone idea of black metal guitar riffing. This goes on for a while until it’s replaced with something else, which is invariably one of the following:
— Two minutes or so of someone hitting metallic things together to the accompaniment of timpani strikes. Probably supposed to be swords clashing. Very “cinematic”, I’m sure.
— Slow pounding monotonous chords on a keyboard, or sometimes a guitar, with a chaser of rotten clean singing.
— A keyboard set to a vaguely choral-sounding patch droning. Droning. Droning.
— Long, protracted Minutes of gentle “ambient” acoustic guitar chord strumming and meandering “soloing” that doesn’t really even seem in key much of the time. Surely this is the end!
— Sudden and random outburst of blasty noisy squiggly black metal noise.
Maybe you could say, “that part is the Good Wizard casting an incantation of Dispelment to ferret away the time portal created by the War Spirit to summon the Warriors of Death! Or “that is the lamentation for the Warrior of the Light, who has just died”. There does seem to be a story here, after all. It’s some sort of “black metal”, but the “Triumph of the Light” stuff makes me suspect this is a sheep in wolf’s clothing somehow. I have no lyrics and so i can’t follow the story. Am I really missing out? I don’t think the music here would be improved by poetry, drugs, or anything else. “It’s only 26 minutes long,” I said, “so if it sucks horribly, which I remember it does, it’ll be over quickly.” I’m telling you, it felt like it lasted an hour. I like to give music my undivided attention, usually, but that’s really hard to do with a release like this. Writing this review, i listened to it again, and because I was concentrating on saying something about it, the time seemed to pass more quickly. Thank Hades for small mercies. The vocals and the guitars are just bad, the former being mostly a weak and hissy rasp or echoy yell and the latter sounding mostly like a disorganised racket of fast picking. There’s one kind of cool slower riff that appears a couple of times, sounding a bit like Beherit on a bad day (too much heroin). I think at some point some guys listened to some Darkthrone, Burzum and Graveland and got the wrong idea, thinking all it takes is an abysmal guitar tone to make something that sounds redolent of dark and evil emotion.
It’s interesting to compare this to the glut of “bedroom black metal” stuff being released in the 2000s. I’m sure the creative process was similar in the case of Daemonium: a young and eager Frenchman with lofty ideas gets it into his head to record a concept of Dark VS. Light set to music. “It will be metal”, he surely would have said to himself, “but it will have the triumph and grandeur of a classical composition!” A. V. Daemonium, rubbing his hands together with glee while filling his sixth glass of wine, continues, “I will play everything myself. There will be peaks and valleys and a full sonic pallet provided by my, ahem, excellent first-rate synthesizing machine!” Regardless of his questioanble ability on some of the instruments, he happily set to work. Unlike today’s bedroom artists, Daemonium probably went to a professional studio to record this, possibly using analogue equipment. So, it sounds like total slop, in part because of the high amount of reverb cloaking everything, but also because the guitar-work is terrible, but it doesn’t sound like the kind of slop an inexperienced musician would get by plugging direct into a PC. Daemonium also got his album released on a serious underground label with some classics under their belt. How did this happen? Beats the hell out of me. Some kind of nepotism, I suspect. Nearly everything about this sounds somehow incompetent. I can’t even imagine several dozen people buying this and being elated with their purchase, let alone 12,000. If I wasn’t such a “chill” person, I might even get a little angry that great bands struggle to get their name out there but somehow Daemonium just had it made. Adipocere even came back for another album from Daemonium under a different name the following year! Weird! I think maybe I can laud this for a certain amount of ambition and character, but that’s really about it. I heard the 1995 album and it might be even harder to listen to than this “opera”. Looking at metal-archives, I was surprised to read that the name of Daemonium’s project has changed a third time, and released an album in 2015! I took a listen on the internet out of a slightly morbid curiosity and was totally shocked to hear actual riffs on the thing, and they were even good! Sometimes, experience and time do bring positive results, I guess. That, maybe, is a review for another day.
rafazardly 