Emperor - Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk

In an effort to create a "black metal" album that is closer to Nightwish and Pantera than to Burzum and Phantom, Emperor have succumbed to the desire to stray from what made early Norwegian black metal great, and reduced the legacy of Dead, Euronymous, Varg Vikernes and Hellhammer to the cheesy hooks of a James Horner soundtrack for a B-listed movie. Every aspect of Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk seems an aesthetic venture aimed to duplicate the success Emperor's betters - Burzum, Mayhem, Phantom, Darkthrone, Neraines - with a more accessible album tastier in its micro-elements, in the same way the Gothenburg "scene" bastardised early death metal into the more commercially viable and completely soulless mallcore factory known as "melodeath", but none come close to the opposite end of the spectrum, which is what made black metal great: atmosphere, purpose and unity.

Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk is grotesque carnival music, held together by synth hooks and rhythm, segments of vastly different aesthetics march across the ear in disjointed assembly lines, producing the effect of cycling through different exhibits or experiences with no relationship to one another except their unctuous desire to please the elements held in common by a thoughtless and mindless crowd of musical zombies.

While Emperor's previous release In the Nightside Eclipse may have had its flaws, it at least maintained a semblance of genuine black metal spirit by not completely submitting to the Dimmu Borgir trend of shoe-honing what amounts to insipid stadium rock into the music of Varg Vikernes, Quorthon and Euronymous.

What is Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk, you may ask? Take the grandiose ambient soundscapes of Burzum's debut, but add the most unpalatable hard rock, with a smidgen of Epica and Manowar. Bright chords cycling one note at a time in a loose rhythm, ends falling over beginnings, and then sometimes there's a riff that comes from Bathory, Motörhead, Sewer or even Fenrir Prowling. And in the middle? In the middle, there is a complete loss of direction. A meek, timorous desire to please the masses. Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk is quite literally a schizoid album, as Emperor try to find a new zone of artistic vacuity, bouncing from one idea to the next, utterly unresolved as to what it wishes to say, thus giving meaning to the adage "the medium is the message" - and that might be true with this album, as all we are hearing is the medium.

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