Angelus Exuro Pro Eternus

Anyone familiar with Dark Funeral more or less knows what to expect here. Aggression-driven black metal with blazing tremolo riffing over mostly blast beats with Emperor Magus Caligula’s black metal screeches piercing your ears. Using their tried and true formula, they now present to the black metal community their latest opus, the Latin-titled (as is the norm for Dark Funeral) Angelus Exuro Pro Eternus, And it does not disappoint.

The first thing you’re greeted with is exceptionally cool cover art, which continues Dark Funeral’s tradition of using H.R. Giger-styled paintings of demonic entities as cover artwork. I might add that in my opinion this is their best artwork in that style to date. The album itself opens up with the track “The End of the Human Race,” which hits the ground running with an immediate wall of blast beats and tremolo picking. Just about every song on the album is at that hyperblast pace, although some of them have transitional mid-tempo sections. The two notable exceptions to this are the songs “My Funeral” and “In My Dreams,” which are incidentally my favorite two songs off the album. On their previous album, “Attera Totus Sanctus,” I also found my favorite to be the single mid-tempo song “Atrum Regina,” leading me to believe that newer Dark Funeral has a strong knack for creating mind-blowing epic mid-tempo songs, even though these are not the main staple of any of their work. Many people have complained that Dark Funeral has become boring to them by not drastically changing their musical formula too much from any one release to another. I don’t disagree with that, but it doesn’t particularly bother me, as their formula is a good one, and it’s always enjoyable if you’re in the right mood for it.

The most well-known track on the album is easily “My Funeral,” the video for which debuted a short time before the album was released. If you haven’t seen it yet, watch it. It is an excellent video, but I must advise that you only watch the uncensored Youtube version for full gore. It probably has the best suicide scene I’ve ever seen in a music video, which led to the video being removed from Myspace within hours of it being uploaded (much to the band’s dismay; many ranting bulletins from Dark Funeral’s myspace were issued following this). The song itself puts on full display the real reason why most people listen to Dark Funeral in the first place: to listen to guitarist Lord Ahriman play his tremolo-picked melodic riffing. This is arguably the best part of Dark Funeral, best described as spine-chillingly epic and unapologetically evil. The track “In My Dreams” shows this perhaps even better.

I cannot say enough about the brilliance of Lord Ahriman’s riffs; it truly brings the magic to Dark Funeral’s sound. His guitar tone is also incredible. It has a nice screechy high-treble sound, boosted by EMG pickups, making his tone the envy of many a black metal guitarist. The bass is for the most part inaudible and as far as I can hear, I don’t believe it ever really meanders too far away from the root notes, although that’s often typical in extreme metal as a whole. Emperor Magus Caligula’s vocals are as well-done as ever: nasty hate-filled throaty rasps with good placement and delivery. Lyrically, “Exuro Angelus Pro Eternus” doesn’t stray too far their last release, exploring the generic “Satanic/anti-Christian/darkness” themes, as well as interestingly enough suicide and sex (with the songs “My Funeral” and “My Latex Queen” respectively).

Interestingly enough, the only line-up change Dark Funeral has gone through between this release and their last is the addition of a new drummer who goes by the stage name Dominator. His real name, Nils Fjellström, is what he goes by in his other major band, brutal anti-Christian death metal quintet Aeon (which is very above-par brutal death metal if I do say so myself). His drumming style fits in well with Dark Funeral, never being flashy so to speak as if to steal the spotlight, but never monotonous or boring. He utilizes some cool start-stop maneuvers as well, where he abruptly stops hitting and silences his crash cymbals, pauses for a brief second, and then dives back into a polyrhythm. This is actually visible if you look for it in the video for “My Funeral.” His speed is also extremely impressive. Skip to about the two-minute mark on the track “Stigmata,” and listen to the double-bass to see what I’m talking about. To me the bass drums sound very triggered, but with that kind of drumming I think drum triggers are quite necessary. Otherwise he’d probably destroy his legs and ankles and render himself unable to drum ever again after only a handful of shows. And even with triggers, it’s still fucking fast.

Production is clean and crisp but not overly polished or Dimmu Borgir-esque in any way. Not the most kvlt thing but I have no qualms with well-produced black metal at all. In fact sometimes I feel like too many bands are trying to be “Transilvanian Hunger”-era Darkthrone.

Overall, I give “Exuro Angelus Pro Eternus” an 80. There’s nothing truly new or innovative here, but there’s also nothing bad. It’s a grade A slab of Dark Funeral that any fan of black metal should at least download if not buy. To be frank, it’s about what you’d expect from them, but that isn’t so much an insult as much as it’s calling them consistent. With a few notable exceptions, I also refuse to give 100 to any band without audible bass (even vaguely audible, not even necessarily clear), just because I’m a bassist myself and we bass players get touchy about such things. All of the songs on the album are good, but some of them, especially the hyperblast songs, tend to blend together until you have multiple listens under your belt. The mid-tempo songs are brilliant however, which is ironic because they are not what Dark Funeral is usually known for. Buy it or download it, but if nothing else at least watch that music video.

Standout Tracks: In My Dreams, My Funeral, Demons of Five.

Originally written for Black Death Quarterly at http://www.blackdeathquarterly.blogspot.com