Eternal Throne

Eternal Throne by Battle Dagorath is a decent modern black metal album. Eternal Throne really reminds me of In the Nightside Eclipse to an extent, which isn’t a bad thing as it was arguably Emperor’s crowning achievement. Eternal Throne is a lengthy album, which is really only broken up by the few minutes of ambience scattered on the album. The ambience isn’t even really scattered, the album opens and closes with an ambient track that appears to have been composed by the same person who mastered the album. I don’t find myself listening to that much black metal from California, but Eternal Throne is an album that I thought was done well and in a truer black metal form.

The album really kicks off with the second track entitled ‘Dead Eyes of the Moon’, which starts off with a slow cold riff and some doom paced drumming. After about a minute and a half of this, it speeds up significantly into cold tremolo riffing and blast beat drumming. The vocals stay generally at the same mid-pace and are done quite well and sound a bit foggy and distanced, as if the vocalist is screaming from across a mountain peak. There is a faint echoing in the vocals as well that give them a heavy and crushing presence. ‘Ruin Upon the Mountainside’ has dark and thick riffing and quite a bit of blast beats. The instrumental work of Battle Dagorath does remind me of early Emperor, except without any of the heavy symphonic backgrounds. Battle Dagorath basically follows a very similar formula throughout tracks 2 through 6. Not to say this is a bad thing, however, I think more variety would have made this a stronger album. The melodies on Eternal Throne are heavy and very cold, yet they do have catchiness to them. Of course, if you like harsh and fast black metal, I think you will enjoy Eternal Throne. As for myself, I find Eternal Throne to be a little bit too consistent with the only real variety found in the opening and closing ambient tracks.

I find some of the tracks on Eternal Throne to be too lengthy with little noticeable variation. However, the vocals on Eternal Throne are done well and with a unique style that I mentioned previously. Blast after blast of drums isn’t exactly what I find appealing, especially when that is all I seem to be hearing from the drums.

Finally on track 7 we get something different after a half hour of grinding. ‘Carn Dum’ is a rather strange sounding song, with evil sounding wind ambience and high pitched astral sounding guitar notes. This track is actually quite good, and has thick cold atmospheric soundscapes which lasts throughout its duration. ‘In the Forest of Frozen Darkness’ also has an astral feel to it, with more high pitched guitar riffing. If Battle Dagorath had expanded and experimented with this to other songs, I think they could have had a mysteriously epic and cosmic album.

I suppose my main complaint about this album is the fact that it got rather weak through the middle, by being overly consistent and repetitive. There could have been a couple of ways to fix this, possibly scale down the length of the album from an hour to something a little less. Or possibly expand on the ideas of ‘In the Forest of Frozen Darkness’ to other songs. The high pitched cosmic riffing on ‘In the Forest of Frozen Darkness’ was cold and dreamy, the best work on the album.

Overall, an album that had some good ideas, but didn’t quite develop them fully. However, I expect that their follow up album could be something to keep an eye on, as they have great potential.