esta review reflete o que eu acho deste album. Gostei do primeiro engoli o segundo depois disso, bahhh!
“Am I Evulllll?” Who cares?
With the coming of their new album Lawless Darkness, released just one week after completing another, minorly controversial appearance at this year’s Maryland Deathfest, Watain prove once again successful in rousing even cynical American audiences with their feculent, death-covered spectacle.
After so many public appearances one would think the group's sincerity, no matter how many cracks appeared in their too human facade, would at this point be non-debatable. Yet only the band’s growing popularity can properly explain the apparent shock to some that Watain, in the minds of its founders, is more than mere on-stage performance; that “performance,” for them, is too mundane a word for it.
The opposing view that no one could or should be so serious about anything as trivial as Black Metal, nevertheless validates Watain’s mission. Either one has managed to disregard their extremest ideals in favor of aesthetics for a half-hour of thrills, regard it only as a front, or see them as so repugnant as to question one's support for such odious villains in the first place.
I’m convinced of their being convinced. Less so of the idea that a recent uproar is based more on the unproven substance of frontman Erik Danielsson’s remarks than the implications for listeners were they indeed true.
But while moralists wait to pounce on Danielsson with questions of “baby-rape,” they overlook the already repeated approval of murder, torture and humiliation carried out by vast catalog of individuals and governments. For those now striking a moral pose, if you haven't already found something offensive to complain about the band up till now, that's your own problem.
At any rate, the question was answered before:
Just look around you! Our master have worked his way through religion since ages, isn’t that obvious? Who can deny the ineffable splendor of the holy Christ? The holy outbursts of goodness deformed into luciferian madness. The holy inquisition whose inhuman, sadistic urges and genocides blended in magnificently with their quest to deprive the world from sin in the name of God. Hitler, the great visionary whose good hearted vision of a new and better world discharged into a wonderfull overflow of deadly hybris and a world in flames! The god fearing monks of the catholic church who couldn’t resist the temptation of Satan as he placed these innocent little boys before their lustful hands. The knights of the half moon who in the name of their God engulfs the entire world in suspicion and ill will through acts of terror…Treacherous it is, the ageless ouroborus, with it’s bittersweet offerings to a world in hunger…
My belief is not a part of the Judeo-christianity pattern, but the other way around. Just as a bricklayer need to shape his stones in order to build his wall, so does the Lord place the mosques, the churches and the synagogues on each other, to build His own temple of the earth, where His voice is speaking through each and all of them.
-Strength Through War zine, 2005.
The problem then, for those willing to stick around, should be how the implications of Danielsson and his cohorts being Satanists first, musicians second, have unfortunately been realized with the quality and ferocity of their work becoming less with each new release. That only those blinded by hype and sharing the same delusion that factory-produced personalized occult paraphernalia counts as restoring the myth of a “tradition” rather than exposing its every fault and weakness.
The longer Watain continues the more each release increasingly relies on association, interpretation and most importantly, as evidenced by the recent covers of Decibel and Terrorizer, low lighting as the source of their diminishing power.
Strip away the sharp, Dürer-quality work by Polish artist, Zbigniew Bielak – stylistically opposite Timo Ketola’s illustrations nearly oozing off the pages of Sworn to the Dark – and what’s left are mostly longwinded and tiresome renovations. All five minutes of opener, “Death’s Cold Dark,” are inconsequential enough to say the album doesn’t even properly exist until the start of its next and best track, “Malfeitor.” The album’s first single, “Reaping Death,” is generic Armageddon ra-ra-ra; A leaden nine minutes of evil semi-tones on “Wolves Curse” ends appropriately with crickets chirping and “Kiss of Death” serves as simple reminder of how much better are The Chasm at riffing off Dissection.
More captivating are the instrumental title track, followed by “Hymn to Qayin,” at least showing that Watain haven’t completely given up crafting more dramatic material after “Stellavore.” But even with these rounding out the album’s strongest tracks it isn’t enough to even out the ratio.
It’s not terrible, see, so much as it’s just fucking whatever. Easy to be sold on one’s own over-confidence when “the world” deemed conquered only pretends to care. Perhaps in time Watain will overcome that naivety or maybe Danielsson finally “frees" himself before the day he lines up with Glen Benton to purchase a new dialyses machine. Either way, victory by default just ain’t enough anymore, boys. Hell’s heard better.
[Todd DePalma]
http://www.thelefthandpath.com/lefthandpath/
