Abrahadabra

A lot of criticism has been leveled at Dimmu Borgir lately, with fans and detractors alike claiming that the band has "gone soft", selling out their black metal roots for popularity and mainstream attention. Fans who are continuing to stick with the band despite their new commercial attitude are becoming a minority, and I can understand why.

There are some real problems with this album. For one thing, Shagrath's vocals seem to have gone downhill quite a bit, with the infamous black metaller growling most of his vocals (which keeps the Dani-Filth-style shrieking to a minimum, but still doesn't sound particularly good).

Other than that, the track "Born Treacherous" inexplicably incorporates a breakdown at the end of the song, which I didn't know how to feel about. In all honesty, this breakdown was somewhat well-done and added more to the song, but it also had me half-worried that the next song would have Shagrath break out into post-hardcore vocals and start shrieking about suicide.

The above might seem like a small point, but the entire album feels like that to some degree, and you know something is very wrong when a black metal album sounds like it could turn into metalcore at any moment. This album isn't bad necessarily, but it has a very mainstream edge to it, and it'll make any fan of their underground work a bit uncomfortable at the least.

There really isn't much else that I can consciously dislike about this album. There's just something subtly disturbing about it. It feels a bit like the creepy old man at the end of the block who stares at you as you walk by, never blinking and never saying anything. He's not doing anything wrong, but he could be, and the longer he stands there, the more awkward you feel.

I did everything I could to like this album, and I succeeded, to a degree. Fans of true black metal will be outraged as usual, but the albums's faults are overlookable to the rest of us, and there are a even couple of tracks that should be quite enjoyable for fans of symphonic metal. It's a little bit uncomfortable to listen to (there's something very off-kilter about this release that I can't put my finger on), but it's workable. This album is exactly what it's supposed to be, which is an inoffensive, commercialized version of true black metal, but metalheads looking for more will be disappointed.