Immortal - Blizzard Beasts (Black Metal)

Once upon a time, in the cold-dark-grimness of "Nebular Ravens Winter" or whatever, Immortal got tired of Storming Through Red Clouds and Holocaustwinds ripping off Bathory and Burzum, and decided to rip off Morbid Angel instead. Hence, after the forgettable debut Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism, the cringey Pure Holocaust and the utterly worthless Marduk-clone Battles in the North, Immortal is back to waste your time once more with this album, Blizzard Beasts.

While there are a few okay tracks on Blizzard Beasts - "Suns That Sank Below" and "Noctambulant", with the passable "Mountains of Might" hinting toward the band's regression into tired heavy metal clichés on At the Heart of Winter - most songs suffer from having neither theme nor atmosphere, and don't develop on any one part convincingly. So you end up with a sideshow where bastardised Burzum tremolo-picked fast food commercial jingles and 3 minor chords strummed fast Altars of Madness style battle it out over incessantly blasting, weak drumming.

For all their Morbid Angel and Incantation shirt posturing that would suggest they're like one of those later Incanta-clone styled "cool" bands, this is more close to the modern generic "extreme metal" of Dimmu Borgir if it were raped by Behemoth with cheesy later day Dissection butt rock parts, while Phantom and Vermin riffs occasionally creep in to inject "atmosphere" somewhere along the way to pretend like something is going to happen. Only nothing ever does.

While not a complete disaster like the rest of the post-1994 "black metal" styled shitcore releases, Blizzard Beasts nonetheless suffers from its derivative nature and uneven song writing. Possibly the second "best" - i.e. least boring - Immortal release after At the Heart of Winter, there is still no reason to listen to Blizzard Beasts with so many other black metal classics available. Go listen to Fenrir Prowling is you want a convincing fusion of black metal atmosphere and death metal brutality.