All of the melodic black-metal innovations that Immortal became famous for raised their demonic heads yet again on this fifth album. Immortal cemented their rep outside Oslo with a previously unheard-of cross between the crush of German-style thrash (think Kreator) and the rippling sheets of guitar distortion that identified black metal. Certainly one of the most influential bands to emerge from the scene, Immortal never were simply a "black-metal" band. One listen to first cut "Withstand the Fall of Time" and its spray of ideas is evidence enough.
Descending from Valhalla with "793 (Slaget om Lindisfarne)," a 16-minute super-epic about a battle that happened before the year 800, Eld finds Norwegian band Enslaved continuing on the path toward Viking metal, despite the presence of prominent black metal elements: shimmering walls of guitar, high-speed tempos and exhaustive double-bass drumming. The schizoid shifts in style are hallmarks of a genre Enslaved essentially created themselves. The band's insistence on tossing in decidedly sideways keyboard parts where you least expect it just never gets old.
"Bizarre," "weird," "different" -- these words fail this Japanese experimental metal band's magnum opus. While the beautiful Japanese folk/classical coda of opener "Corpsecry" is in contrast to the rest of the song, it's the straight-faced curveballs hummed at the listener's face that follow that make this the absolutely unique work that it is. Reggae breakdowns, saxophone solos and marimba interludes fit remarkably well with death grunt vocals and in straight-up black metal songs. "A Sunset Song" is the key track but you want to start at the beginning.
Despite the fact that Carpathian Forest formed way back in 1990, they didn't get their first proper record, Black Shining Leather, out until 1998. This second album surfaced in 2000 and is almost a textbook about the effect Celtic Frost had on the black metal scene. With a hurtling combination of thrash metal riffage and subtle stabs at orchestral elements, Strange Old Brew feels like a Norwegian version of Into the Pandemonium, and that's before you get to the super-weirdness of "House of the Whipcord" (saxophones!) and "Cloak of Midnight" (scary female whispering!).
This hugely influential record, a sludgy mixture of hardcore brutality and heavy metal majesty, seethes with Venom's early power.The band pretty much disgusted anyone with "taste" when this came out in 1982, but the joke was on them: the metal was so extreme, it was nearly a parody of itself. Thankfully, the kids in Norway thought they were serious.
Originally issued in a vinyl run of only 1,000 copies, Bathory's 1984 debut set the blueprint for the Norwegian black metal horde that would follow it. Recorded on 4-track in songwriter/guitarist Quorthon's garage, the static wash of guitars and gargling Satanist vocals remain about the earliest example of black metal, along with Venom's Black Metal album. (Black Metal -- though not as stylistically influential -- actually coined the term two years before.) In interviews, Quorthon has said he'd never heard Venom and was instead taking his cues from Sabbath, Motorhead and even punk rock.
A truly definitive black-metal album, In the Nightside Eclipse, released in 1994, was Emperor's first full-length, released by fledgling Candlelight Records. Universally regarded as Emperor's finest work and an archetypal document of the Norwegian scene, the album features "I Am the Black Wizards," the song for which Emperor are most famous. It's no wonder, as it sounds like Satan himself makes an appearance at 3:50. Other highlights are Ihsahn's throat-shredding wraith-screech and pick-shredding guitar style. The band even manages to swing, in "Wizards" and "Beyond the Great Vast Forest."
This creepy-crawly Italian black metal album's title Google-translates as "Owl: Cursed in Eternity" -- what a hoot! Opera IX, said to be symphonic goth pagans, are artsiest and most intriguing in their opening prologue (Gregorian chants, big bells, inverted Latin words) and eight-minute closer "Historia Nocturna" (almost coherently composed, from nearly grooving start to folkish end.) Between, it's your usual random zombie-moaned and demon-screeched blood sacrifice, with sporadic rock-derived guitar lines, Laibach-like brassiness, and classical gassiness lost deep in the mulch.
These Norwegian black metal kingpins continued to take what Bathory started straight to the Seventh Circle with this 1993 release. Some of the death metal elements they began with remain, but for the most part Under A Funeral Moon bears the beastly markings of true Norwegian black metal: awful sound, painfully choked vocals and a brutal simplicity. You can't really understand anything Nocturno Culto is scraping from his beleaguered vocal chords but you're most definitely better off that way. Culto (nee Ted Skjellum) is a school teacher now.
Aske was not recorded while Varg Vikernes was incarcerated, but the original cover art for it was a photograph of a burned-out church, generally accepted to have been taken by the black metal linchpin/a-hole himself after setting it. Burning down churches with nobody in them may not be the worst thing in the world, but killing your friend for not being "metal" enough is up there, and Vikernes' politics are abhorrent. Still, there is no discussion of Norwegian black metal without his inclusion, and the D.I.Y. nature of this 1993 EP is one of the key elements of that scene.
One of the original Norwegian black metal bands, Satyricon released this debut in 1993. Marked by carnival-of-dead-souls keyboards and guitars drenched in reverb, the album also offers a smattering of acoustic guitars and the occasional flute interlude. Unlike their peers, Satyricon concern themselves thematically with pre-Christian times, Norway's formidable landscape and Viking culture more than desecration and Satanism. That probably explains the flutes. Despite the absence of Baphomet and his buddies, Dark Medieval Times remains as extreme as any fan of the genre could want.
First released in 1994, Gorgoroth's debut full-length bears the marks of their earlier '90s counterparts except in that the recording is approximately 1,000 times better, giving the Bergen-based black metal dudes an almost contemporary, not-lost-in-time, feel. The mewling screech of vocalist Hat further sets Gorgoroth apart; in a scene choked with eternally damned wraiths fronting every band, Hat's throat-shredding rasp is almost melodic. This whole record's good, but the real fun starts with the archetypal black metal breakdown halfway through "Crushing the Scepter."
The third album from Poland's Behemoth, Pandemonic Incantations finds the group morphing from straight black metal into a death metal band, making for their eventual labeling as "blackened death metal." Featuring guttural vocals instead of screeching, a machine-gun spray of breakneck changes, and a near-constant double-bass attack, Pandemonic Incantations reaches truly impressive heights in brutality. Following a jaunty, almost cabaret-like opening, things really get going with song No. 3, "Satan's Sword (I Have Become)."
The Gothenburg-based band's second record, 1995's Storm of the Light's Bane features a stronger black metal feel than their debut. Where The Somberlain drifted into both melodic death and folk metal, here Dissection stick close to the path of frozen, funereal chug, presumably with the black-hooded vocals of the mounted wraith on the album's cover punctuating the action. Every song on this 8-track exercise in gloominess rushes past like a blizzard, with about 10 seconds of respite bookending "Retribution." This 2006 re-issue includes the Where Dead Angels Lie EP.
Norwegian experimental band Ulver's legendary third album tells the story of a werewolf through hyper-speed sheets of guitar, eternally damned vocal savagery and pure white static distortion. There are approximately 15 seconds on this album of acoustic guitars. One of the most aurally challenging records to come out of the whole microphone-hating Norwegian scene, Nattens Madrigal bears the distinction of allegedly having been recorded on 4-track in a forest at night. Given the fact that other bands in this scene burned churches and killed people, that idea does not seem so appalling.
Blake Judd and Co. return on their fourth full length, and first for Century Media, to bring their blackened psychedelia to new frontiers. Experimenting, or "meddling," with sounds such as saxophones and ambient textures produced by keyboards, Nachtmystium's ever-changing black metal-ish sound destroys all boundaries, becoming harder to pinpoint stylistically. With so many different moods and departures, the pleading pain of "Your True Enemy" and stark tranquility of "Seasick (Part 1: Drowned at Dusk)" offer glimpses of the brutal but poetic enigma that is Assassins.
Keep of Kalessin, a violently melodic band among Norway's blackest, build upon their brutal groundwork with thrash, speed and most of all progressive elements on this fourth full-length. Working their malleable sound to showcase honed-in guitars, fantastic melodies, galloping drums and sing-along-worthy shouts where typically stood gory growls, KoK's epic adventures in the form of nine colossally produced songs continue black metal's forward motion on the aggressively anthemic "Against the Gods" and the grandiose title track, "Kolossos."
