DARKTHRONE — Ravishing Grimness (review)

DARKTHRONE — Ravishing Grimness album cover Album · 1999 · Black Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Warthur
By Total Death, it appeared that the direction Darkthrone had taken from Under a Funeral Moon onwards, whilst it had yielded good results up to and including Panzerfaust, was beginning to run out of steam. So, after three years of dormancy, Darkthrone returned to the scene with an album which is essentially a return to the approach of A Blaze In the Northern Sky. The songs are slower and doomier, reminiscent of the brilliant Kathaarian Life Cycle dirge from Blaze, and the lyrical subject matter steers away from the increasingly vitriolic hatred of recent albums to return to the esoteric and melancholic meditations of the first two.

Though, on the whole, the band were treading water with this release, stepping back and returning to an older style before considering which new avenue to explore, it's a decent enough work which will appeal to anyone who enjoyed Blaze In the Northern Sky, though I don't think it'll ever rank amongst Darkthrone's classic albums and it doesn't quite shake them out of the rut they'd landed in (and would languish in until they injected a big dose of crust punk into their music).
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more than 2 years ago
I think this is their best work since the classic trilogy.

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