Article by Lance Viggiano.
U Transu Sa Nepoznatim Siluetama presents a longing, melancholic, and nostalgic view on black metal ripped straight out of the playbook that enabled artists such as Alcest to score big with the empathetic loner crowd. On the surface, this music is presented as your standard affair of devil music yet it is bereft of even one note of existential weight or tantalizing, decadent forbiddance which typically characterizes Faustian gambits with the dark. The music swings, bounces, pops, and dances in the light. It is so light in fact, that gravity actually helps uplift these sounds.
Then there is the overwhelming familiarity which strikes the listener immediately. These are well-considered compositions that look backward for source material but otherwise fail to provide new meaning. The past is alive but it is practicable and pedantic. Zloslut shamelessly flaunts catchy and immediately gratifying candy culled from across the metal spectrum. A delicate and emotive arpeggiated tremolo-picked melody ripped right out of Norsecore will be seated right next to a Rotting Christ-style heavy metal motif. Burzum and Gorgoroth have their post cards along route 666 through the use of ringing bar chord breaks.
This is one of the rare albums where sloppiness, uncertainty, and disorganization could have been a boon as it would have colored the music with a wild charm and sense of adventure. The riffs are supposed to add up to a meaningful experience but the stark reality is that this is a Now That’s What I Call Black Metal! recollection of genre hits. Quite possibly the most radical statement this album could have made would have been allowing the genre-verboten blues to blossom into a David Gilmour solo on the first proper track.
Listen to and download U Transu Sa Nepoznatim Siluetama for free from Zloslut’s Bandcamp page.
Tags: 2016, Black Metal, modern metal, pop metal, re-review, review, Serbian Black Metal, U Transu Sa Nepoznatim Siluetama, zloslut
Great writing. Hope to see more of this guy around here.
I agree, and not because I share his values or opinions. I often don’t.
I especially like his criticism of Transilvanian Hunger. I like that album, though he described it as audible candy for the overly sentimental. It’s true that out of all Darkthrone albums, Transilvanian Hunger probably appeals to “goths” and other unmetal people more than the previous two.
However, it doesn’t go overboard, so I still like it.
Daww thanks bae
The audience it could appeal to shouldn’t be the only consideration paid. If that was the case, then we shouldn’t listen to The Red in the Sky is ours and Filosofem since they could appeal to emos. Demilich could find appreciation with jazz fusion wiggers and, if you look at some of their facebook fan pics, they already have.
He was the one with the retarded Transilvanian Hunger article?
Nahh, didn’t sound like him.
T.H. is pure uncomprehended gold. And no, I dont know any emo or goth, it is the most corrosive of all Darkthrone albums.
If anything, it is the only Darkthrone album that most cannot listen through.
“The audience it could appeal to shouldn’t be the only consideration paid. If that was the case, then we shouldn’t listen to The Red in the Sky is ours and Filosofem since they could appeal to emos. Demilich could find appreciation with jazz fusion wiggers and, if you look at some of their facebook fan pics, they already have.”
That it appeals to them is irrelevant. However, the reason it appeals to them is that it has certain traits, which is relevant.
“T.H. is pure uncomprehended gold. And no, I dont know any emo or goth, it is the most corrosive of all Darkthrone albums.
If anything, it is the only Darkthrone album that most cannot listen through.”
I think that it has a little bit of melancholy or sentimentality, which those people are drawn to. But unlike Lance Viggiano, I don’t think that it has so much that it hurts the quality of the album.
I think it’s the same with Demilich and Jazz traits. They have a good, reasonable amount of jazz in their music.
It is a funny fact that Fenriz agrees with me about the goths.
Source: https://youtu.be/7L7_Psu93Cg?t=5m
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVPYw1GdWxc&list=PL4iLjksVfyhSlZo1UNpOOYl2x7uPiE1at&index=7
But maybe you are right about them not being able to listen to all of it. They may just pick a few tracks. I don’t know.
This is cheap criticism, and I don’t say that because it disagrees with my own review, but because Lance isn’t usually so lazy. If you’re going to flame composers for lack of originality (which is never a negative aspect by its own virtue), then having some supporting evidence is the only way to legitimize this as an attack. Norsecore because of… tremolo picking? No. Heavy metal? Where? Burzum? There’s the similarity in melancholic expressiveness, maybe. The rest of the comparisons are imprecise at best.
> [CITATION NEEDED]
Did this review get cross posted on Reddit?
Then I took a meme arrow to the knee.
It’s the melody itself that he says is ripped out of norsecore. It just happens to be a tremolo picked melody.
I don’t even know what norsecore is – I have no opinion on this matter. But that’s what he said.
Granted, you are correct, but the melody and it’s similarity to anything else is only hinted at rather than described.
I gather Norsecore is supposed to be stuff like modern Satyricon and Mayhem, but I’m not very sure. A nerdy in-joke is amusing, but a poor substitute for dissecting and analyzing musical components, or even just using some descriptive metaphors.
Anyway, I don’t have a dog in this fight but I hate to see a band get trashed undeservedly. You know how fickle and easily-swayed DMU readers are…
Norsecore is kind of a vague term, but if I think of any album which best describes it it’s Diabolis Interium by Dark Funeral.
One-dimensional, almost incessant blasting, always fast.
It’s like with all those “great” bands out there who think that the brutalest of brutal death metal composes of metelcore chugging which sounds like bowel movement noises or that sound when you shit from your anus but the shit is kinda liquid, but still chunky enough to not be called diarrhea. By that I mean that they think they just have to use the most barebones of aesthetics of the genre they’re trying to ape and turn the paint huffing up to eleven to produce a real masterpiece of shit.
How can a melody even be described, without either
1: Referencing other similar melodies (which he did)
or
2: Straight up giving us the music notes (which he could do, actually)?
We can indicate how melodies are similar other than “eh it reminded me of something else I heard”. For example, notes can be near or far apart in terms of intervals, changes from one note to another may be rapid or otherwise, melodies can be short and cycled often or long and repeated rarely. Progressions can ascend or descend. All of these descriptors can be understood by someone without any knowledge of theory, and when used effectively present a more accurate representation of the sound and then the experience that goes along with it. This is like one step beyond middle school creative writing.
For instance, Dark Funeral play basic minor chord progressions with lead melodies that rise and fall with the introduction and end of each chord. That took no imagination or critical analysis of theory, it’s just a bare description. Lacking this, I assume that a reviewer did not in fact pay enough attention to the music to come away with anything other than vaguely emotional thoughts about what expectations of his were subverted and which were fulfilled.
Those descriptions are accurate, but are they useful?
I don’t get a very good idea of what the melody is like, because even within those categories, there are so many possibilities.
But sure, it’s better than nothing, which is close to what we got here. And if you add enough such statements, maybe one can deduce with some accuracy what the melody is like by filtering out what it’s not through elimination.
“basic minor chord progressions with lead melodies that rise and fall with the introduction and end of each chord”
Why are you asking me to describe the music in a manner which poorly illustrates the actual thrust of my criticism?
Because your criticism appears to come down to being personally disillusioned with the album.
You have two positions from which you attack the music:
1. It’s too light for black metal. This is hard to disagree with right off the bat, but your don’t support your position other than dropping all the no-no words that metal fans hate (pop, bounce, etc). So this attack becomes easy to write off as opinion because clearly you have a refined paradigm for black metal that is violated by this album. But that offers us no clue as to whether the album is worthwhile, unless we presume to have identical opinions. Therefore it is a mere complaint.
2. It sounds like other albums. This is never valid criticism alone. If you look hard enough you can find similar riffs in almost any good album. Hell, Sacramentum sounds like Dissection, but it’s not a good idea to dismiss Sacramentum offhand just because they share aesthetic similarities with a shitty band. In fact, a closer look at the music reveals difference that are subtle enough to bypass the casual listener. That’s why people look toward reviewers; for a more in-depth perspective than Knuckledragger McMetalhead can offer..
What I would like to see: David Rosales trashing the latest Gorguts and Fallujah. Maybe talk about how Luc Lemay’s “classical” allusions aren’t enough to salvage his dissonant nu-metal/industrial rock informed post-rock music wearing a death metal mask. “Entertainment” on par with Kanye West in flamboyance… “but they can play their instruments”! Brett Stevens allegory of the wallpaper is perfect for today’s world.
Search. Lemay’s technical life muzak was already trashed.
Fallujah are so bad, it’s not even the “little bit funny” sort of bad that you hear sometimes. It’s a downright insidious kind of bad.
…but people are falling for it.
Yeah, but most people are idiots.
If they’re that easily duped then they can have their shit and eat it too. Metal is esoteric; trash like Fallujah acts as a filtering system that prevents morons from going straight to the core of each genre and raping it from the inside out.
SJW-kore.
I don’t think that they are duped. They know exactly what they are getting, and they like it.
It’s like those people who listen to pop music about a girl or boyfriend who left the singer, and my heart just aches and I want you back but I also “hate” you, and so on.
They know what’s up. And they like it. That’s just how they are. They are not like you are.
Yeah, they’re stupid.
At least Slipknot and their ilk didn’t feign erudition. If there’s anything worse than nu metal, it’s snooty nu metal…
At this point, Lemay is just writing post-rock and using his music degree to justify empty “artsiness”.
His excuse is that modern “classical” music (which is anything but classical) has room for this sort of stupidity.
Required reading: http://www.metal-archives.com/reviews/Gorguts/Colored_Sands/379853/bitterman/321549
To whom do we submit content to these days?
The same as always: editor@deathmetal.org
Wow, blast from the past over here…
Lance, what do you think of Sacramentum?
I ask because you seem to pee your pants in antipathy when a consonant interval graces your ears.
.
This album is alright, certainly better than the most recent from Morbus 666 and Sorcier Des Glaces.
Sacramentum is fine. I unfairly trash them in certain company to get under that company’s skin but in truth I like the first album a lot – a few complaints aside.
I agree about Morbus which is reheated Gorgoroth leftovers. SDC has consistently disappointed me with every release since Primitive Forests.