DIMMU BORGIR — In Sorte Diaboli (review)

DIMMU BORGIR — In Sorte Diaboli album cover

Album · 2007 · Symphonic Black Metal

1.5/5 · 2011-02-28
topofsm

The extreme metal crowd is a tough crowd to please. If you claim to be a death, black, or thrash metal band, you had better damn well follow through with what you say there are. Otherwise, stuff like Dimmu Borgir tends to happen. Instead of insanely heavy crushing, tearing black metal riffs, they like to use standard chugging along basic synths and replace the lo-fi atmosphere with standard orchestrated stuff. Overall, the black metal crowd does not get very pleased.

It can all be summed up with the phrase "blackened pop". While maybe it is a bit of a hyperbolic statement, it still rather describes Dimmu's later output well. It can hardly be called extreme, and some of the sections are downright danceable. Sure, there are quick double basses and tremolo pickings to be found on In Sorte Diaboli, but there's also singsong choruses, basic synths, poppy riffs, and even the vocals are rather discernable (nearly hypocrisy in black metal's realm).

What doesn't help is the production on the album. Say what you will about their recent output, it has generally good mixing, but the production is quite loud on this album, resulting in a lot of dry noise wherever the drums tend to overplay (a lot).

It also doesn't help that there are tons of angular sections of each song that seem to be put together piecemeal to make a 4-minute song. This is exemplified in the opening, "The Serpentine Offering", which starts off with a building orchestral theme, continues on, and then slows down into a more rock-based section. Then without warning it goes back into the marching theme to repeat the chorus. From there in swaggers back into its slower melodic bridge section for the singing. From there it changes times twice. The rather blender-like sections with no musical relation don't help the album whatsoever.

This is the case for most of the album, making it a tiring listen. Not only do the song structures seem to be jumbled up so the band can clam coherent four to five minute songs, but the drums play unnecessarily fast in parts. For example, "The Sacriligeous Scorn" starts off with a bouncy haunting synth riff for several bars, and suddenly comes into a blast beat. Such playing is common on the album, and while blastbeats and quick two-step drumming is common practice is common in black metal, Dimmu's midpaced music and melodic base doesn't bode well with the drumming. Especially on such a loudly produced record, where everything sounds like a producer's mess, a place where overplaying drums can do wonders to damage an album. There are plenty of progressive black metal bands (Arcturus, Enslaved, Borknagar) that play relatively slower paced black music and it doesn't need to be overplayed.

Particularly egregious is the fact that the band seems to want to put together a coherent work. There are several reoccurring lyrics that pop up in several places on the album, and it ends up telling a complete story. But it seems like Dimmu lacked the musical ideas and pieced together a few riffs with the glue of some bombastic keyboards and unnecessary drumming.

Overall, In Sorte Diaboli is the pinnacle of everything many dislike about Dimmu Borgir. There's nothing extreme about the songs themselves, and the unnecessarily double-bass friendly drums do the best to disguise the record as something extreme, even though under it all it's basic midtempo standard metal. The songs are pieced together poorly, and it's poorly produced. Even among Dimmu's latest there's a lot more worthy things to listen to. Avoid unless you know what you're getting into.