Exordium

Why do bands do this? By 'this', of course, I mean completely mislead you when you start a CD up. Exordium's self-titled debut begins in a mildly creative fashion, with an extended intro of glitchy, murky electronic ambiance, and it's actually sort of interesting; it prepares you for something not quite industrial, but at the very least cold and somewhat unique. Granted, the band does its very best to disappoint you utterly after this intro via some of the most generic and lifeless black metal I've ever heard, but at least the intro is nice. So what's the point of an intro like that? To confuse you into thinking what you're hearing is more creative than it actually is? There's no logical reason for such a vast aesthetic shift, so I'm content to believe the people behind Exordium are just morons.

There's absolutely nothing remarkable about this music past the intro, apart from how smugly self-assured it sounds. That might be a bit of a complex accusation to put on a piece of music, but I can't say it feels inappropriate to me; while listening to this I get the feeling that the band is absolutely convinced of their own genius in every note. I don't know where this misplaced sense of self-satisfaction comes from, because Exordium's music sounds exactly like every other modern underground black metal band. Riffs are tremolo-based and low, the drums are slightly sloppy and predominantly blasting, and the vocals are a midrange snarl buried in the mildly murky production. The riffing is singularly uninteresting: all the melodies are recycled from other, better bands and none of the riffs seem to have any real point to them; they just sort of monotonously drag on and cycle back for no real reason other than to create repetition. The songs have no variation in anything but tempo, which will occasionally drop to a listless midtempo or average thrash beat; as you would expect, this has a net result of nothing on the quality of the music.

What is the point of stuff like this, and why would a label feel the need to release it? Even while I understand that Mikko Aspa has apparently taken it upon himself to single-handedly drive the entire Finnish black metal scene, this seems below even HIS standards. Exordium plays entirely bland and forgettable music without even a trace of uniqueness past the intro. It's music that can only inspire boredom, and while it's relatively competently played and produced, the songwriting is absolutely pointless and anticlimactic in the worst way, with songs that drag on and on and on and never manage to arrive at a destination. Who is this designed for? The band themselves? An absolute waste of time, just ignore this.