Review by Rexorcist for Blasphemy - Fallen Angel of Doom.... (1990)

I need to really thank Metal Academy for motivating me to explore more war metal.  A couple days after I get back in black metal, this thread shows up and suddenly a bunch of war metal albums are being reviewed.  And of course, there are bound to be a couple reviews for the most famous BBM album ever: Blasphemy's Fallen Angel of Doom.  In Daniel's review here, he wrote: "Blasphemy managed to combine all four of the major extreme metal sounds of the time (i.e. death metal, black metal, thrash metal & grindcore) into one swarming mass of largely indecipherable noise."  And he was right.  It was ONE noise.

I heard this album on DMS, a YouTube channel that provides full metal albums with high sound quality, and that includes really dirty sludgy albums with the proper production for the job.  This is just having come off the back of checking out various Teitanblood and Infernal Coil songs, as well as re-evaluating a few black, prog  and death albums.  Pretty much every song shares a 98% DNA similarity.  The production here is only there for the brutality, defeating its own purpose as you can barely here anything beyond the drums which are more or less doing the same thing for all 30 minutes. This production doesn't even sound as dirty or noisy as good black albums tend to be.  it's just bad.  Also having come of the back of the much lesser-known Cabinet's album Claustrophobic Dysentery, which mixes death and black with occasional doom, noise and ambient for very weird sounds, in comparison this album feels more like a bunch of jokers recording a bad demo for a major label rather than an actual studio album.  I'm not kidding.  That's EXACTLY what it sounds like.  it doesn't even get creative with the concept of non-studio works like Bee Thousand did with the concept of Beatles bootlegs. The heaviness was definitely cool at first, but they practically beat it to death, and they only show their most imagination through small bits in the LAST TWO SONGS for crying out loud.

This album will be mimicked many times throughout history, but most will likely succeed because... DAMN.  This album might be brutal, but that's the only strength to me.  Otherwise, it's more boring than Bob Dylan's Shadows in the Night and Trapt's self-titled.  Stick with Teitanblood, Cabinet and Goatpenis.  This is the single most overrated album I have ever heard.  I haven't hated a beloved album this much since that obsolete helf-star rating I gave the Ramones debut years ago (upgraded to a 9/10, bion).  Please tell me the other one will be better.