Darkthrone - Under a Funeral Moon

Production: The first of the black metal bands to achieve the ascendancy of distortion from guitar effect to overall production aesthetic, Darkthrone added a granularity of organic noise to the music as well the room sound of the production and the cutting of tracks in random lightspeed fades, an aesthetic shift that now has been adopted by even the worst of the imitators.

Review: In a generational attempt to explore the motif of music fashioned from extremely minimalistic collages of elements normally written off as garbage, this album furthers the windblower noise aesthetic of the previous Darkthrone with even further simplified and atonal riffing built upon chaotic patterns allocated to center the logic of its music around nihilism. Aggressive, punk-influenced and extremely harsh and fast guitar tempos are driven by the ambient beat master Fenris, who builds his drums around multiply interconnected streams of layered beats in the same running tempos without missing a chance to diversify the inflection of the ever-changing pattern structure.

Hoarse sawing guitar ranting drives this album but what makes it strong is the underlying principle of the snare-highhat-cymbals rhythmic runs inflected in reference to the strongly dominant vocals, a rhythmic and tonal device that appreciably augments the compelling motion of this music under its bizarre and evil melodic tonal changes. A new theory lurks in the transition of notes across spectrums of pattern already defined within the music, promoting a nihilistic and objectivist worldview of how information links to itself and constantly expands.

Tracklist:

1. Natassja in Eternal Sleep
2. Summer of the Diabolical Holocaust Heavy metal, death metal, speed metal, doom metal, grindcore or thrash mp3 sample
3. The Dance of Eternal Shadows
4. Unholy Black Metal
5. To Walk the Infernal Fields
6. Under a Funeral Moon Heavy metal, death metal, speed metal, doom metal, grindcore or thrash mp3 sample
7. Inn I de Dype Skogers Favn Heavy metal, death metal, speed metal, doom metal, grindcore or thrash mp3 sample
8. Crossing the Triangle of Flames

Length: 40:43

Darkthrone - Under a Funeral Moon: Black Metal 1993 Darkthrone

Copyright © 1993 Peaceville

Spiritual in its intensity and the drive behind its ecclectic intensity, this album is the masterwork of Darkthrone and their best work before or since. Variety of song structures maintain a consistency through an insistence upon a simplicity tempered by minimalistic but profoundly direct bridges which address the tension created in these seemingly randomly allocated tone centers and offshoot counterpoints. To top it off, the beauty of this cryptic work is that it functions on two levels: the first as highly abstract and intense art promoting a theory of music and information of its own, and the second as motion-oriented metal with power and beauty in its fundamental rhythms and melody.