Opvs Contra Natvram

To make an album like "The Satanist" is an eternal curse that's going to haunt you for the rest of your days as a musician. You basically shook the very foundations of your own genre, releasing one of its most artistically expressive, influential works in the latest decade - and now, everyone expects miracles and wonders from you. Everyone expects you to keep being an avant-garde genius for the rest of your career, burdening you with the implicit duty to push the genre's boundaries further and further with each and every of your future works. Problem is, you don't arrive at an album like "The Satanist" through conscious, focused pursuit: it takes a lot of energy, vigor and passion (so much that you can't even keep it anymore inside of you, as it's screaming to get out), and even a bit of luck. Compared to previous Behemoth albums such as "The Apostasy" or "Zos Kia Cultus", "The Satanist" is a work of instinct more than a work of intelligence: everything Nergal wanted was just to put his emotions down into sonic form after having defeated his leukemia; you can't make that up, it just happens. I remember, right after "The Satanist" came out, Nergal was even considering the hypothesis of quitting the band to pursue other interests in his life, feeling he had already satisfied all of his artistic goals with Behemoth - and I mean, I could fully see his point, given the immensely cathartic, almost full-circle nature of that record.

So it felt kinda weird to see Behemoth returning with a new album, back in 2018, all eyes gazed upon them with unrealistically high expectations: and, guess what, when the new record wasn't up to these high expectations, everyone got mad at Nergal and started calling him a ripoff and a buffoon. "I Loved You at Your Darkest" was caught in a weird mix between formulaic, "safe" hit songs and timid attempts to take Behemoth somewhere else with some gothic, almost operatic experimentation; while far from being a disaster, the album didn't click with most seasoned extreme metal listeners, and by early 2019, everyone seemed to have already forgotten it. Even last year, upon the release of "Opvs Contra Natvram", the hype was much more restrained than usual - and that's very telling for a band like Behemoth, generally well-known for their imposing personality among the metal scene at large, and once capable of making the Earth tremble just by making some insignificant announcement. "Opvs Contra Natvram" is, indeed, the album where Nergal gives up any trace of artistic ambition, settling down for a safe, standardized, paint-by-numbers formula that's basically "Satanist"-lite (and, if you've read the previous paragraph, you know you can't really do that), in order to at least satisfy the, ahem, younger demographic (i.e. the zoomer/TikTok/poser-ish metal crowd) he's left with by now, after the more savy part of his fanbase has jumped ship for good in recent years. It's basically the artistic requiem of what once was one of the most radical, untamable, uncompromising forces in the extreme metal scene.

The album doesn't start off bad. After the promising, splendidly titled "Post-God Nirvana" intro, "Malaria Vvlgata" blasts in with some fairly solid riffage that grabs you by the throat, giving you hope for something at least comparable to the previous record. "The Deathless Sun" is pretty nice too, with a very catchy, majestic, almost operatic chorus reminiscent of the experimentations heard on "I Loved You at Your Darkest". Then, "Ov My Herculean Exile" comes in, screwing everything up: slow, dull and devoid of any atmosphere, pompous yet irritatingly empty, being not backed up by any songwriting idea that doesn't consist in sparse, unmemorable, generic Mgła-style arpeggios that every fucking black metal band is so enamored with nowadays. Those same arpeggios that were used with a strong, definite atmospheric purpose on "The Satanist" (just go back and listen to its beautiful, unforgettable title-track), here are just utilized as a mere commodity to fill up space in the absence of better ideas, like too many subpar bands nowadays tend to do. This song is basically the full realization of what was dangerously foreshadowed on the more simplistic, commercial hits from the previous album, such as "Ecclesia Diabolica Catholica". I get that Nergal found out with "The Satanist" that he doesn't need to think too much in order to write a song (he wrote "Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer" in half an hour if I recall correctly), but that does generally work if you have a strong idea to build on, driven by an exceptional creative fire like that of a man who has just beaten a deadly illness and now feels like screaming at the top of the world with all the strength he has left. And, after such an unbelievably powerful roar, it's safe to expect that man to run completely out of air.

Things only go downhill from there. No other track on the whole album manages to be solid enough to grab your attention, indulging in a laundry list of the band's clichés with no memorable ideas behind them: a bland mixture of weak pseudo-black metal arpeggios, the same old trite, vaguely oriental-sounding chord patterns that have now become Behemoth's only way to signal "epicness" to the listener (already a stale cliché at the time of the "God = Dog" single, back in 2018) and, occasionally, some goofily over-simplistic rocklike drumming (especially on "Neo-Spartacvs" and "Once Upon a Pale Horse") that feels like a waste of talent when you have a drummer like Inferno - all these ingredients, wrapped up in uselessly pompous trumpets and near-atonal choirs desperately attempting to project the usual sense of epic magniloquence and sublime theatricality we've known and loved since at least the "Demigod" album; unfortunately, this formula cannot sustain itself once the creative well has run dry, something I once thought to be impossible for such a hungry band as Behemoth used to be - more precisely, they were the hungry band par excellence! Now that they're fat, smug and comfortable, their once ever-changing formula has turned into a safe brand for edgy young kids who just got into extreme metal and aren't yet ready for the true underground stuff.

These songs constantly scream for your attention, with the roaring guitars and blast-beats, the growling vocals, the choirs, the trumpets and the horns, everything put simultaneously at the forefront... and yet, nothing does truly emerge from this mess, to reach you and shake you in the deepest parts of your soul. For the first time in Behemoth's history, their bombastic sonic assault on the senses just feels like background white noise - a fate usually reserved to inferior modern acts, sometimes the ones attempting to follow Behemoth's footsteps in the first place: now, in a sad twist of fate, the kings of Polish extreme metal have become their own imitators. Not even the lead single "Off to War" can shake the listener from his boredom, being just the most banal half-thrash cavalcade imaginable - let alone the rock-infused number "Once upon a Pale Horse" with its painfully static stop-and-go riffing, almost reminding us of Dissection's "Reinkaos". The last two tracks are the only ones showing some vague hint of promise (especially "Thy Becoming Eternal" with its kinda cool epic choir), but the good ideas still struggle to emerge from the auto-pilot mode the band is stubbornly stuck on. When the mildly endearing final climax of "Versvs Christvs" is over, you just feel barely shaken and a bit more empty than before. After all, you've just witnessed your teenage idols fail, and not even in a spectacular, remarkable Metallica/Morbid Angel kind of way: just in the usual, safe, pre-packaged way all the big modern metal names tend to fail, nowadays - which is, by not doing anything wrong and not taking any risk.

Nergal remains to this day one of my favorite human beings within the whole metal scene: an immensely intelligent, insightful, thought-provoking man who always speaks his mind, stands for the right causes and embodies the true meaning of the word "satanist", much moreso than most of his egregious colleagues in the extreme metal genre. However, it's clear he just doesn't care anymore about music the way he used to around one or two decades ago, and Behemoth by this point is just a job for him. And how to blame him? As stated earlier in this review, the only audience he's left with are basically just metal noobs and posers, after his hardcore fanbase abandoned him out of spite for not being capable of delivering something on par with "The Satanist", and also for his quite hilarious social media theatrics that don't seem to sit well with the metal audience; I'm well aware of the moralistic, short-sighted stance most metalheads tend to have on social media influencers, but I happen to find both these reasons for hating Nergal to be childish, petty and quite idealistic. Do they really expect Nergal to churn another "The Satanist" out of the blue, and to restrain himself from being an "Instagram whore" if he enjoys being just that as a well-known, self-proclaimed hedonist? If they think so, then, they're ironically the ones who seem to have the most puerile stance on Behemoth, even compared to their current fanbase, almost entirely made of zoomers and posers who just stick to recent hits such as "God = Dog", "Bartzabel" and "Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel": it's no wonder Nergal decided to focus on pleasing this less demanding, definitely less pretentious fanbase, in order to keep making a living without too many troubles, in spite of any artistic velleity he clearly has exhausted anyway by this point.

I'll wrap up this review with a fresh story: a couple of months ago, I visited a very well-furnished record shop. Among the countless albums I purchased for my music collection (all this, in front of the shopkeeper's incredulous face), there were a bunch of Behemoth CDs I had yet to buy, such as "Demigod", "Evangelion" and the very cool Metal Mind boxset containing all their early works. "Opvs Contra Natvram" was the only one I left on the shelf, to collect dust next to Arch Enemy's latest snorefest, right where they belonged.