Satyricon - Dark Medieval Times (1994)Release ID: 2698
Hugely atmospheric and majestic black metal from a time when Satyricon were truly great.
Satyr and Frost may be writing catchy, crunchy metal these days that works well live, but they are not even remotely as interesting or creative as they were when Dark Medieval Times was recorded. This album has so many dimensions thanks to Satyr's genius ability to create thick atmosphere and Frost's drumming virtuoso. The production is suitably raw and full, yet each instrument gets plenty of room to breathe. The riffs are cold and dark, yet epic and majestic. The acoustic interludes, keyboards and samplings are beautifully performed and chosen. Frost's drumming is never anything but perfect (as I can personally attest after witnessing them live recently) and Satyr's vocals fit the mood impeccably with a combination of venom and grace. It's a simple case of two kindred spirits working together to create a monumental whole.
Album opener Walk the Path of Sorrow is probably the band's finest moment along with Mother North off Nemesis Divina. The title track, Into the Mighty Forest and Taakeslottet are almost as good, and Min Hyllest til Vinterland is a beautiful instrumental piece filled to the brim with wintry atmosphere. It's very difficult for me to find fault within this work, but I guess some of the song structures don't fit as neatly together as they could, breaking from black metal riffs to acoustic passages and back without really transitioning in a pleasing way. But after a couple of listens, you come to accept these flaws as part of the unique, fascinating experience that is early Satyricon. An underrated album for sure!
Norwegian black metal legends Satyricon & I go way back. Way back to this, their 1993 debut album in fact. From the very first time I heard opening track "Walk the Path of Sorrow" on underground metal radio programming I was hooked on this band that would go on to become somewhat of an icon in a soon to be saturated Scandinavian black metal market. That experience would see me seeking out whatever material I could find from Satyricon in the tape trading scene & would subsequently lead to me purchasing Satyricon's next two CDs upon release. But... despite always finding Satyricon's music to be greatly enjoyable, I must admit that I've never regarded them as a tier one black metal player alongside the Burzum's & Darkthrone's. Instead, they've always seemed like one of the leading players in a very solid second tier & that's something that I intended to challenge when going into my first revisit of their first full-length "Dark Medieval Times" in a while, particularly after reading Ben's five-star review recently.
It's easy to forget that the early Second Wave of Black Metal days still saw a band like Satyricon being a deeply underground act & the original cover art that was utilized for "Dark Medieval Times" provides further proof of that fact with the image looking not too unlike a schoolboy's dodgy hand-drawn art project. This is a shame really because that image is not a good representation of the musical maturity the album contains within in my opinion. The record was self-produced by seventeen year old band leader Satyr too which is not only fairly surprising but provides even greater perspective on where the Norwegian scene was positioned at the time & just how quickly it would explode onto the world stage over the next twelve months. While no doubt sounding suitably primitive, Satyr's production job gives "Dark Medieval Times" the aura & atmosphere it required in order to create a dark fantasy world full of frostbitten landscapes & unholy gatherings.
Satyricon's lineup had changed a fair bit over the first couple of years of their existence with Satyr (Wongraven/Storm) now being the only full-time member remaining from the four-piece configuration that recorded their 1992 self-titled demo tape. Guitarist Lemarchand (Dold Vorde Ens Navn/Ulver) is still there although he's listed as a guest contributor rather than a full-time member. The addition of infamous drummer Frost (1349/Gorgoroth/Keep of Kalessin/Zyklon-B) at the expense of original skinsman Exhurtum (Aura Noir/Infernö/Ved Buens Ende/Cadaver/Dødheimsgard/Ulver/Virus) for the band's second demo tape "The Forest is My Throne" was a masterstroke & may well have been the turning point that saw that particular release taking a noticeable step up along with the tragectory of Satyricon's careers while original bassist Wargod didn't last too long & was long gone by that stage as well. It's this partnership of Satyr & Frost that would become the basis for Satyricon's sound for the remainder of their careers & also provides the clear highlights of "Dark Medieval Times" along with the contribution of session keyboardist Torden.
The band's first demo didn't exactly set the world on fire & it would be the "The Forest is My Throne" tape that would first see the underground scene's ears perking up. I recently revisited that early cassette (a release that I owned in a bootleg CD version during the middle of the 1990's) & found that it already offered enough of what made those early Satyricon albums so great to keep me interested. "Dark Medieval Times" would see Satyr & Frost taking the next logical step though & would represent a commanding show of strength for a group of musicians that were still so young with Frost being just twenty years of age at the time of release. Satyricon's debut full-length is a highly atmospheric release that beautifully captures the icy Norwegian Winter & it's spectacular landscapes in musical form, particularly during the more keyboard-heavy sections of the album. In fact, I think there's a reasonable case for a dual tagging with the more targetted atmospheric black metal subgenre here with the more effective song-writing largely pushing out into more atmospheric territory & a strong folk component being incorporated in some of the pieces. The four-&-a-half minute folk piece "Min hyllest til vinterland" is the only demo track included & I think it's benefited from the additional time in the studio as I tend to prefer the album version. The remaining six pieces see the band hitting on a more consistently impressive level of blackened creativity.
The tracklisting opens with comfortably the best piece on the album in the wonderful "Walk the Path of Sorrow", a song that still sits up there with my favourite Satyricon songs to this day. Satyr's evil vocals are a real highlight of not only this track but the album as a whole. It's been interesting to confirm my long-standing suspicion that the remainder of the record struggles to match its opening track though as I can't say that I find any of the other six pieces to be particularly classic. There are no doubt classic sections (such as the transcendental slow parts of closer "Taakeslottet") but I don't think Satyricon have managed to pull together another whole song that ticks all of my boxes here & that's largely why I've never rated "Dark Medieval Times" as highly as Ben has. The second & third tracks (i.e. the title track & "Skyggedans") see the quality level being brought right down to merely being acceptable after the brilliant start to the album & leave the remaining four tracks with the task of pushing my affection back up to four-star level. There's no doubt that the potential was there with the best parts of the album being nothing short of breathtaking but I can't deny that there are a few less mature periods where the band can't quite pull it all together in as professional a fashion.
Don't get me wrong, "Dark Medieval Times" is still an essential release for anyone wanting to indulge in the Second Wave of Black Metal. It's doesn't, however, compete with the finest work to come out of Norway at the time & I feel that Satyricon's best work was yet to come on their next couple of albums. I intend on revisiting those over the course of the next few months so it'll be interesting to see if my pre-existing opinions on those two records have remained intact. As it stands though, "Dark Medieval Times" is an excellent example of the inspired creativity of a relatively small group of young individuals from a faraway land that managed to captivate the global extreme metal scene like few others before them.
For fans of Taake & early Emperor/Burzum.
Satyricon is a band with two distinct eras; the thin blasty variety found on this album which sounds like most things in this genre from that time, and the Black N Roll era of the music they play today.
What's that outside? Holy shit it's a bunch of corpse paint-clad purists marching on my lawn because I like the Black N Roll stuff better.
Adjectives: Low-fi, blast beat, tremelo guitar, raspy vocal. Did I get everything? No? There are medievel instrumental ambient passages in here too? Do they score extra points for that? Not from me.
It's the same monotonous drivel again, and this isn't Nemisis Devina, so you don't even get "Mother North" for your troubles.
The Evil Knight's Folklore
With most of Scandinavia throwing whatever they could muster at the Black Metal evolution dartboard during the insanely dense and important years between 1992 and 1995, Satyricon's Dark Medieval Times proves to be one of the more middling classic releases in terms of inspirations. It sits in an unfamiliar zone in comparison to its peers as it's not as grandiose as something like In The Nightside Eclipse, nor as raw and evil as De mysteriis dom Sathanas, nor as fantastically atmospheric as Minas Morgul, yet it still shares all of these classic Black Metal aspects in one package. While Dark Medieval Times can be a mess thanks to nonexistent transitions and overall erratic pacing, the way Satyricon is able to merge extremely raw sounding Black Metal with folk and fantasy elements to create a memorable and vivid atmosphere is top notch.
Although Satyricon’s production is seriously grindy and abrasive, this album is surprisingly riff based instead of being a flurry of tremolo progressions. Tracks like “Into the Mighty Forest” have their fair share of blast beat tremolo, but the rest have ripping mid-tempo riffs that use the overly distorted guitar tone to their advantage with all of the longer sustained notes in their rhythms. “Skyggedans” and “Dark Medieval Times” especially show that Black Metal doesn’t always have to be aggressively fast or dense to have great riffs or build a ton of atmosphere. These grinding Black Metal riffs and flat but punchy drumming are layered with the rest of the fantastical sounding synths and choirs to great effect, creating the obvious atmosphere of the album’s namesake. Pretty acoustic passages also come and go throughout the album, giving it a distinct and folky sound that wasn’t too common at the time.
The album’s title track “Dark Medieval Times” is the ultimate example of Satyricon’s style, having abrasive Black Metal riffing randomly give way to synth-backed acoustic melodies that is supported by somewhat grand sounding orchestral aspects with a bit of flute thrown in there for good measure. The way the acoustic guitar comes in during the slowly, more deliberate Black Metal riffing is especially well done and fits the atmosphere of the album perfectly. “The Dark Castle In The Deep Forest” and “Taakeslottet” reprise this formula well enough, each having their own take on the mid-tempo riffing with whimsical flourishes that Dark Medieval Times excels at.
Throwing all of these different elements together is bound to have issues though and, for the most part, Satyricon don’t even attempt to hide the haphazardness of their songwriting. As much as “Dark Medieval Times” is the shining example of the style Satyricon were attempting to convey, the lack of transitions and the seeming randomness of the acoustic sections can put a damper on the whole production in general. These are incredibly apparent on “Walk The Path Of Shadow” and “Into The Mighty Forest”, with both tracks sounding like 4 or 5 different riffs and folk melodies tossed together aimlessly to form each track, held together only by the repeating synth and acoustic melodies in the background.
Even though Dark Medieval Times can be jarring and amateur sounding, I think there’s a charm in the haphazardness of it all. The album doesn’t necessarily come together as a cohesive whole objectively in terms of songwriting, but the consistent atmosphere and quality of the riffs and acoustic melodies is undeniable even if they don’t all exactly fit together. Even the instrumental interlude “Min Hyllest Til Vinterland” has a dark edge to it that is sufficiently captivating. It helps that I enjoy a bit of folk in my Black Metal, since I’d say that Satyricon’s debut is as close to proto-Pagan Black Metal as you can get with the atmosphere it creates and the melodies and instruments it uses. I have a lot of respect for this album given what it was trying to do, even if it didn’t fully succeed in giving me a fully realized, folky, atmospheric Black Metal experience.
