Helvete - Det Iskalde Morket

I confess to missing Throne of Katarsis’s debut album, An Eternal Dark Horizon, although I was familiar with their demo of 2004, Unholy Holocaustwinds. The three tracks on that record were reasonable enough to pique my interest in this latest record, being as they were fairly reasonable slabs of Norwegian black metal. The band’s sound is easily comparable to early Mayhem, but typically they expand the song lengths. The five tracks on Helvete Det Iskalde Morket last just under an hour, making the average length over ten minutes.

I wanted to review this because Unholy Holocaustwinds showed enough melodic sensibility to be interesting within what is clearly an overcrowded marketplace. The songs didn’t have much focus to them, being mainly a procession of Mayhem-worshipping musical passages that didn’t really form a coherent whole. But, the riffs were nice enough, and there were some worthwhile melodies.

This one gets boring way too fast. It is one thing having long songs that sound like a line of ideas rather than a unified entity. Some people get away with this with no problems at all. (Isn’t that right, Opeth?). But when a lot of those ideas are basically the same thing, just in mildly different manifestations, then you have problems. Throne of Katarsis present us with a series of mid-tempo, mid-range tremolo riffs with a sound that is slightly lightweight to my ears. It rarely gets fast or brutal enough to rival a band like Behexen, the melodies are extremely unlikely to stick in your head at any point, and whilst there is a little bit of evil atmosphere, it certainly won’t keep you awake at night. It all kind of blurs together. The strongest moment is definitely the The Darkest Path, where a mournful slow riff trudges rhythmically along as if in a funeral procession, which could almost be a black metal version of the beginning of Slowly We Rot. The riff lingers and is returned to throughout the track, making it probably the record’s best composition.

This is all as generic as it gets. Obviously, this doesn’t mean it should be written off... There is always room for straight-up black metal, of course. But Throne of Katarsis don’t really do enough, in my opinion. I’ve mentioned The Darkest Path, and this really stands out as a fine slab of second wave black metal. But as a whole, this record doesn’t really add much.