May 2020 Feature Release - The North Edition
It's now May which of course means that we'll be nominating a brand new monthly feature release for each clan. This essentially means that we're asking you to rate, review & discuss our chosen features for no other reason than because we enjoy the process & banter. Ben & I will certainly be contributing & we look forward to hearing your thoughts too.
This month's feature release for The North is the record most responsible for kicking off the entire Second Waves Of Black Metal movement in Norway. That's right ladies & gentlemen! We'll be taking a look at Darkthrone's infamous sophomore release "A Blaze In The Northern Sky" from 1992. Strap yourselves in & bring your jacket because you're in for a particularly cold & frosty ride.
https://metal.academy/releases/451
Please don't crucify me!
When I look back on the origins of the second wave of black metal and the sounds that were presented by Burzum, Mayhem and, of course, Darkthrone, I vaguely remember my distaste for the subgenre, and extreme metal in general. Part of this is inevitably my age; I was never around to experience this wave first hand and my introduction to power metal in my youth deeply skewed my preferences in the genre are towards the more bombastic and power/symphonic side as I got older.
So going back to listen to the album that is considered by many as one of the genre's landmark albums, I felt...underwhelmed. The mixing of the guitars is bad. I've listened to original 1980s records of hardcore punk albums that had better guitar tones than this! The songwriting wasn't much to write home about either. There were some ideas and some of them did sound pretty good on their own, but not as a collective and certainly not in their frequency.
Again, maybe it's my age and growing up with a fully grown tree rather than a root in the ground, but I'm still not a fan of this album. I will always respect it for what it did and pushing the genre forward, but this doesn't hold any weight for me in comparison to albums by Emperor or Dissection.
6/10
That's certainly a valid opinion saxy. Personally, I was already a First Wave black metal fan by the time this album was released & it just absolutely floored me. The sheer audacity to even attempt it in the midst of the very peak of the death metal movement showed these guys to have gigantic mega-balls & it was just what I was looking for at the time. You'll rarely find a more accurate depiction of pure darkness & the cold Norwegian winter than this.
4.5/5
My review that I have up for A Blaze In the Northern Sky is pretty shallow compared to what I normally write, but I think it still summarizes my feelings pretty closely. I first listened to this album when I started the 1st Decade Black Metal challenge, and the album stood out an incredible amount compared to its peers at that time. There were few other bands that really captured that evil and cold feeling better than Darkthrone with this album, and I feel like it is one of the massive stepping stones between Bathory's 1987 album Under the Sign of the Black Mark and Mayhem's 1994 album De mysteriis dom Sathanas. The extended song structure and overall chaos of it is more akin to what I'm used to in modern Black Metal and while it is definitely rough around the edges in terms of guitar clarity and such, it still has clarity to it, which was rare for a lot of Black Metal bands in the late 80's and early 90's. A Blaze In the Northern Sky just gives me exactly what I want from a genre that is supposed to sound cold and evil, simple as that.
4.5/5