Satyricon

You know this album is going to be bad when the first couple minutes sound like Queens of the Stone Age playing When the Saints Go Marching In. A few things about this release were already worrisome. Satyr has repurposed this band into a commercial rock band with black metal aesthetics for the past decade, and recent interviews suggested his passion for making music has waned. The wine galleries, the media appearances... the music was secondary. Then his claims of wanting to make something new though not feeling inspired but forcing himself to make music anyway could only mean one thing: a lack of passion, and covering up what is essentially an afterthought with hollow gimmickry.

This should come as no surprise considering their recent stage theatrics and image. Satyr took his winning formula but somehow came up with an unmarketable version of the rock vapidity he was shipping out the past decade and stripped it down further into what he has been hinting at for 3 albums now. Satyricon sounds like a jam tape from Snorre Ruch (Thorns) playing his favorite Bob Seger riffs and moments from the Top Gun soundtrack. This is so sterile and lifeless, one has to wonder why Satyr is even trying to pass this adult contemporary rock with open string dissonance once or twice a song as metal. He has claimed to listening to only rock n' roll in his spare time and not finding black metal as inspirational as he once did, so why does he continue to try to mask his projects as such? Without the raspy vocals, this could pass off as a The White Stripes album.

Satyricon was planning on changing the way people think about black metal, which can be seen as ineffective right from the outset. The lyrics seem like a parody of themes already explored on Nemesis Divina mixed with a dumbed down version of what Snorre Ruch wrote about on the Thorns album. The supposedly analog production is dismal. Guitars are weak and the drums thud along with no power whatsoever. Musically, the band is content to remain in one fixed slow tempo, with a lot of chords ringing out to create the space necessary for simple drums to establish a foot tapping rhythm. All the songs sound the same (track 3 has a parody of an old Cadaver riff), but some gimmickry is employed. Phoenix has cringe-worthy HIM-esque crooning vocals done by a guest vocalist but aside from that, is indistinguishable from anything that preceded it. The next half of the album attempts to vary things somewhat, with the next song being a "fast" song that feels like a Volcano b-side, but aside from faster tempos (on 2 tracks) and a long closing track employ the same limited range of expression that is utilized on the first 5 songs. Songs have about 3 riffs and meander about without direction, making them seem longer than they actually are. Being the youngest guys from that whole early 90s Norwegian scene, they certainly feel the most lifeless of the bunch nowadays.

This album is the definition of crippled momentum, lost integrity but, more importantly, phoning it in. It sounds like one idea thinly stretched to flounder around for about an hour. This doesn't even have the gimmicky cock rock "let's have fun and make money" shtick that gave their previous three albums marketability, reeking of a "another day at the office, lets phone something in" mentality. If Satyricon were more honest with themselves, they would change their name, drop the raspy vocals, and play populist Queens of the Stone Age styled muzak and give up pretending to be a black metal band, as this is probably the most insincere album they've released thus far, and considering their 2000s albums, that's saying a lot.