Darkthrone - Under a Funeral Moon
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.
1. Natassja in Eternal Sleep
2. Summer of the Diabolical Holocaust 
3. The Dance of Eternal Shadows
4. Unholy Black Metal
5. To Walk the Infernal Fields
6. Under a Funeral Moon
7. Inn I de Dype Skogers Favn
8. Crossing the Triangle of Flames
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.