Darkthrone - Under a Funeral Moon

The best way to explain Under a Funeral Moon is the following: everything A Blaze in the Northern Sky wanted to be. In a more forceful and relatively subtle attempt to explore the motif of music fashioned from extremely minimalist collages of elements normally written off as atonal, this Under a Funeral Moon album furthers the random noise aesthetic of the previous Darkthrone with even further simplified and atonal riffing built upon a few simple but effective chaotic patterns of nihilism and raw atmosphere.

What's so different from the previous release? It works. The riffs are stronger in and of themselves, more complex and artistically meaningful, and the way they are arranged, while simple in that there are only a limited number of transitions per track, is nonetheless far superior to most of what was shown on A Blaze in the Northern Sky.

While not as minimalist as the following Darkthrone album Transilvanian Hunger, Under a Funeral Moon nonetheless explores thematic repetition of a motif as a means to introduce an atmosphere of bleakness and misanthropy, somewhat similar to what Phantom would later show on their debut, with more atonality and less Bathory and Celtic Frost influences.

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