The Imperial Reign of Emperor

by Brock Dorsey on January 26, 2018

The most technically and musically gifted band of the Norwegian black metal scene, the legendary Emperor are also the most well known outside of the documentary-level engagement that plagues most who know of Burzum and Mayhem.  Formed in the small rural town of Telemark Norway as a side project to a soon-forgotten death metal band, the group overcame the imprisonment of 75% of it’s lineup to deliver the most grandiose album of early 90s black metal.  Though Emperor’s career was far from perfect, it made a profound impact on the young genre and ultimately proved it’s limitless developmental possibility.
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DEATH METAL GENERAL: I DON’T NEED ABBATH EDITION

by Brock Dorsey on January 10, 2018

Immortal is back!  Well… sort of.  Halfway there.  Right? In name at least?

You see, Demonaz- Immortal’s original guitarist during the 90’s, lyricist during the 2000’s, and now vocalist/guitarist and lyricist in the 2010s- is back with drummer-on-some-albums skinsman Horgh.  Wait, actually, the two have only played together on one album (out of twelve) so can they really “be back?”  Anyway, Demonaz and Horgh have out-lawyered the band’s drugged out drunken cornerstone musician Abbath, who played every instrument except for guitar when Demonaz was in the band and then played guitar over 9000 times better than Demonaz once the latter got a case of tendentious.  With the name locked down and a healthy Nuclear Blast Records budget, the duo get ready to make a seriously play for the wallets of misguided fans.

But wait, the tendentious that crippled him for a decade is suddenly gone?  Can he still pick at the rediculous guitar tempos of Blizzard Beasts? Can he even play at all?  There’s a lot to unpack in this one, so let’s get trolling as we recap the story of the band who turned black metal’s creepy aesthetics into the hair metal of the 90s…
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Ihsahn: “What I do now is musically still black metal.”

by Staff on June 21, 2017

Ihsahn is recording his upcoming solo album right now in Norway according to Blabbermouth. Furthermore Ihsahn believes that black metal is not a specific type of heavy metal music but rather a mind set and that the random progressive rock and jazzy instrumental masturbation Ihsahn performs now is still actually “black metal” despite not even being metal music to begin with, yet alone black metal.

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Emperor Prepare Anthems… Anniversary Tour

by Daniel Maarat on May 11, 2017

Emperor are currently preparing to tour in celebration of the twentieth anniversary their second album, the third rate Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk. While Emperor kept on wearing armor, Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk saw Emperor simplify their trademark complex, almost symphonic Norwegian black metal sound down to two to three note speed metal influenced riffs with neo-classical wank leads in conventional verse-chorus-verse heavy metal songs to appeal to a wider, Wacken-going audience.

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Emperor: Metal for Mordor

by Daniel Maarat on January 20, 2017

The music of Emperor is commonly misconceived by the mainstream metal media and certain YouTube clowns to be merely an atmospheric wall of sound or symphonic black metal orchestration engineered for superficial, surface level aesthetic appeal to an audience atypical for black metal. This is in fact not the case. In the Nightside Eclipse is just as perplexing to typical headbangers on first encounter as it was upon release in 1994. Mainstream audiences are even more flabbergasted and regard the record as a mere curiosity produced by those murderous church burners, preferring Emperor’s more rock-structured later work such as Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk, which abandoned the band’s signature riffing style and method in exchange for ones influenced by more stereotypical Norwegian B-listers such as Enslaved and Kvist. Emperor did eventually sell out, becoming technical guitar wank, rock-structured heavy metal after their rhythm guitarist Samoth and drummer Faust were imprisoned in 1994 and their songwriting influence subsequently waned. Yet In the Nightside Eclipse‘s hymns to Satan and Sauron remain as natural mutations of their metallic predecessors’ attempts to imitate horror scores and classical music’s overwhelming power of sublimity.

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Ihsahn: New Emperor Album Would Be Pointless Disappointment

by Daniel Maarat on May 5, 2016

emperor bandt

Ihsahn has stated that if Emperor reunited, there would be “Absolutly no point” in recording a new album as “It would be a disappointment.” He claims any new Emperor work would be similar to his masturbatory solo material. Perhaps Ihsahn should have come to this conclusion over two decades ago; Emperor’s post In the Nightside Eclipse material after Faust and Samoth went to prison consisted of merely interesting black metal riffs arranged into one-note verse chorus verse songs propelled forward mainly by soft versus hard contrasts. Ihsahn is right that creatively bankrupt guitar magazine pandering is not worth Hessians’ precious time. Listen to the original master of In the Nightside Eclipse again instead:

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