Review by UnhinderedbyTalent for Murmuüre - Murmuüre (2010)

There are some release that mange to muster such a nonsensical amount of praise and adoration that I often wonder if parallel universes have already been discovered and are being used so regularly that people have routine commutes to them.  Now, before I start to sound all elitist I should reiterate that I still very much abide by the ethos of each to their own.  If you can find enough positives in this release to warrant it being worthy of your praise then that’s fine and you are clearly a better person than I am, dear reader.

I will stand by this opening statement with every last breath in my body though.  The first two minutes of the opening track of this release are the fucking worst two minutes of “music” I have ever had the misfortune to hear in my life.  Genuinely, it sounds to me like a drunk saxophone player has gatecrashed the recording and is fighting with the sound engineer in the middle of the studio.  After this initial fucking terrible onslaught of mindless comedy, the rest of the release feels almost normal.  Normal does not always mean good though and the fact that such a basic structure or form being exhibited is so welcoming a prospect really speaks volumes for the quality of that opening two minutes.

I heard this album described as 30 minutes of progressive-noise, which is not true (out of fairness to both the progressive and noise music genres if nothing else).  The fact is that this artist created a jam session of industrial, eclectic and minimalist music values, touching lightly on black metal here and there.  This occasional bm when coupled with a very bm looking piece of artwork somehow got classified in black metal despite the record clearly being a multi-style experiment that has some black metal in it, not a black metal release that has some multitude of musical style applied to it to make it look clever.

There are reviews/write-ups of this release that talk about it like some holy grail of black metal and or noise and it really is lost on me why.  There’s far too much of an attempt at structure here to justify it being anywhere near noise classification.  It is an interesting take on musical structure and form but it in no way exemplifies any qualities that can justify its cult classic status.