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One thing I don’t mind clearing up is that anyone fearing gothic interludes and tittish vocals are unlikely to have many feathers ruffled, seeing as we get an odd skewing of genres that still doesn’t sound quite right when I say it now: melodic black metal like Dissection running out of memorable riffs and finding some that Opeth didn’t need, Tjodalv drumming like he’s stolen an arm and a leg from Mayhem’s Hellhammer and the other limbs from Lars Ulrich, sinuous leads popping out of Astennu like Adrian Smith buddying up with Mikael Akerfeldt, while Shagrath tends to sound like the only child of Immortal’s Abbath (which Abbath obviously would only have needed himself to create). Oh, and then there’s the keyboards. Fuck, they really are everywhere on Spiritual Black Dimensions and many of the songs are steered – in fact, not only steered but driven with whip thwacking – by what Mustis is doing on his instrument.
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So, what is Mustis doing with the keys? Well, right from the opening of ‘Reptile’, he’s engulfing the listener in a world of nuance and total escape. At no point does this feel like an orchestra has turned up to play with a metal band: it’s more like a metal band have stepped through a portal into a world where their own (slightly limited) musical vision is being dramatized as they play and – especially since I’ve paid no attention to the lyrics – I get full-on visions of shit like Lord of the Rings and Alice in Wonderland and Paradise Lost, which sounds like a weird concoction but it’s really just stuff that immerses you and is done on a grandiose scale. Yes, there are moments on ‘Dreamside Dominions’, ‘The Insight and the Catharsis’, and particularly ‘United in Unhallowed Grace’ where the piano and strings become simply too keen to attach to pining gothic heartstrings, but those are also the moments when the rest of the band drops out to a certain extent and I become aware that I’m wearing my dressing gown while sitting at a desk, which will obviously make those moments less cool. So I guess I’m saying that what Dimmu Borgir do well on Spiritual Black Dimensions is to craft complete escapist worlds of chaos and magic, which – now I actually look at the lyrics – is sort of what they were going for anyway.
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rafazardly 