Burzum - Anthology
Posted on May 09, 2008 at 8:00 am by admin
Cited as an incredibly influential band from the 2nd wave of black metal, itself originating from Norway, Burzum is the one-man black metal project of Count Grishnach (real name Varg Vikernes), he himself famous for stabbing Mayhem guitarist Euronymous (real name Oystein Aarseth) to death when the count began playing bass in said band. I won’t get into the details of Mayhems illustrious past, although I can say that those fans of modern day black metal like Satyricon, or Immortal and other bands like Dimmu Borgir, Behemoth and Cradle Of Filth (whether you count them as black metal or not) should look that story up.
I’ll also put a second note in this review - while I typically avoid bands with racist views (as Varg Vikernes, aka Count Grishnach, the only band member has expressed some) I’ll let Burzum through due to the fact that those views aren’t reflected in the music.
Now what good old Burzum likes is to have much more long, drawn out, raw grim black metal fests, relying less on blast beats and more on torturing himself and the listener, always a plus. While most black metal vocals sound pretty tortured, this features some pretty high shrieking that should prevent most mortals from talking for a good period of time. Also a good plus. Going throughout the years, the songs themselves go through varying stages of incredibly raw production, to some not quite so raw production that still manages to keep that old early 90’s black metal spirit alive. The black metal also grows from standard setting tremolo picked jaunts to more riff-oriented destruction.
Even though the only member of Burzum is locked away in jail, that didn’t prevent him from making more Burzum albums. Instead of black metal though, you get some strange ambient tracks that meld together gloomy horror movie songs with some equally fitting gloomy horror movie background noise, topped off with a little bit of industrial. Then there’s also those keyboard driven songs where Burzum does their best to imitate an orchestra with “Balferd Baldrs” doing a medieval movie soundtrack for the bad guy and “Ansuzgardaraiwa” being the closing song to the next Exorcist film.
While for an anthology, this doesn’t quite cover a lot of bases (it probably should’ve been 2 discs), this disc does show you where many underground black metal bands who aren’t focused on blast beats came from, and also ties in the relation to ambient/black metal. The film-score style songs also fit due to the black metal keyboard connection. Oh, that and Morbid Angel had the very same kinds of segueways in their albums, so it works in this case as well.
Released January 28th, 2008
Candlelight Records at MySpace
Buy this album at Amazon.com and Amazon.ca
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Copyright © 2007, Xtremely Media, All Rights Reserved
