Dimmu Borgir - Stormblåst (Black Metal)

Stormblåst sounds kind of like modern Emperor with even more plastic sounding keyboards, and it sucks. The production is terrible and plagued by excessive distortion and feedback, with the synths drowning everything else out save for the Dani Filth "vocals". Riffs are boring and repeated endlessly, and songs have no apparent structure, although that could just be due to the difficulty I have paying attention to Dimmu Borgir's music for any period of time.

Drumming excluded, the overall musicianship is very shaky with almost every measure of music having something blatantly mistimed or misplayed. The vocals are something of a high point, being merely mediocre rather than absolutely terrible. I guess standard Cradle of Filth "extreme metal" vocals are hard to totally screw up, although Dimmu Borgir eventually manage to do just that on their future releases. The fourth track is an instrumental played on a keyboard, and stolen from an Amiga game, and it's the "best" song of the ten.

The guitars play typical speed metal chugs and merely serve as a background for the vocals and synths. One also gets the sense that the riffs could be rearranged in almost any order and the song would work about as well... or half of the riffs could be cut out... or riffs from other songs could be spliced in at random... or all of the above. I read from time to time that Dimmu Borgir is almost all brilliant music with only a couple of incompetent shit-tier albums dragging the band down, but every time I think I've found one of these elusive shitters, it turns out that people like them too. Can we at least agree that this sucks? If Stormblåst is a good album, show me a bad one.

This is the type of shit that paved the way for Watain and the rest of the "blackened" metalcore tard corral. Stay away from Stormblåst if you value your time and/or heavy metal music.