Review by Rexorcist for Satyricon - Nemesis Divina (1996)
Here it is, the final album I need to review before I finally earn my fourth clan symbol on Metal Academy, the last of the Black Metal Challenge: Nemesis Divina. I've heard absolutely nothing but revery for this album. When I heard their debut, Dark Medieval Times, I was quite impressed with the playfulness, but the second seemed to do away with that playfulness, so I was a bit worried.
The mixing is practically infernal. It sounds like fire coming from the ground just to grab you in the face and yell at you. And these guys have a lot to yell about. The maelstrom of flame will drown out all sound even at low volumes, but nothing suffers in the mixing. It's incredible. Nothing lo-fi about it like in the first two albums. Frost is at his most aggressive and challenging with his drumkit, making for a good deal of the blackened noise that adds to the maelstrom, and the new bassist, Kveldulv, adds an extra layer that they didn't have before. and the new And it looks like some of their playfulness is back as well. I honestly wasn't expecting that jazzy piano outro Forhekset. And it's nice to see them getting more heavily invested in the symphonic sound with Mother North, as well as getting into some proggier territory, especially with their opener, The Dawn of a New Age (could that be any more poetic?) And for their grand finale, they don't go for some standard dungeon synth track like they did last time, they went for a weird piece of softer blackened rock, tribal drums and some ambient on the side. I'd have liked to see more of that throughout the album.
Easily their most challenging and brutal, it's easy to see why the world fell in love with this album. This is basically fire, both in the sense that it's really good and the sense that it burns you up from the inside out. Unfortunately, this is supposed to be where the great stuff ends for the rest of their career, but if this is to be considered a sendoff to that age, then it's a hell of a good one.
95