Band's List Symphonic Black Dimmu Borgir Gateways

FAIL.

Dimmu´s new single from their upcoming 2010 album has effectively killed all hope of Dimmu Borgir ever releasing another good album. I guess even though I knew this album was gonna suck, I had some hopes it would be at least an average album, like PEM was. Dimmu Borgir said their share of things to get people excited for their upcoming release... you know, the kind of things any metal band will pull out of their asses to promote an upcoming album: "Yeah, this is gonna be darker, and uh, it´ll have an eerie and haunting feel to it and... OOOH! It´ll be atmospheric! Let's not forget about that atmosphere!" This song fails at all those things because it's an absolute mess, and whatever atmosphere there could have been is destroyed by the mish-mash of different ideas and feelings that were badly arranged to make this song. Of course, this one song isn´t enough to judge the whole album, and to be fair, I will review the album when it comes out. But for now, what we get is a song FAR cornier than anything off of In Sorte Diaboli.

First of all, who the fuck thought that those girly vocals were a good idea? THEY SOUND LIKE BRITNEY SPEARS´ VOCALS WITHOUT DIGITAL ENHANCEMENT, FOR CHRISSAKES. They stick out like someone wearing a 50 Cent shirt at a metal concert, and had they been left out, I would have at least given this a 6/20. And of course, the theatrics are back in Dimmu Borgir´s production front and centre, only unlike with PEM, the live symphony adds no effect that couldn´t be done with a simple KORG keyboard. Then there´s Shagrath, who, as I said in my review for In Sorte Diaboli, has his vocals completely tired out and feeble. There´s almost no energy or power in his voice (especially in comparison to what he was doing in Enthrone Darkness Triumphant), and that makes it even harder to take the song seriously. Not to mention that he keeps digitally distorting his voice, which is something that almost never works in extreme metal, and should be done SPARINGLY. The digitally enhanced voice is used far too much, and I can no longer associate modern Dimmu Borgir without thinking of these cheap robotic vocals. They sound like garbage, and conflict with the theatrical elements in the song, making it hard to make out what kind of atmosphere the band was trying to create. This goes on for five minutes, with that irritating female vocalist popping up here and there to make the song even worse. This song is garbage.

The only thing I can say about this that is improved from In Sorte Diaboli is the guitars - thank you for at least not making piss-poor excuses for riffs. However, they still aren´t that good anyway. It´s all pretty much run-of-the-mill stuff, complete with a lot of chugging riffage, and it´s made all the worse by the fact that I KNOW Galder is a good guitarist. He just doesn´t show it at all in this song. If there is anything worth mentioning with the guitars anywhere in here, it´s obscured by just about everything else in the production, which gives the whole song a sort of monotony. The drums (done by some guy named Daray) hold a much better place in the song that in the generic machine-gunning of In Sorte Diaboli. The drummer knows what he´s doing, and he definitely shows his style much more than Hellhammer did in In Sorte Diaboli. But the drums only improve the song so much. Drumming alone can´t save any song, and this is no exception.

Now, Dimmu Borgir fans have been chattering for a while about losing Vortex and Mustis (their bassist/background vocalist and their keyboardist), but really, other than the fact that Vortex could´ve replaced the Britney Spears knockoff, there isn´t much difference to how everything sounds. Vortex is probably better off lending his talent to something else. (coughcoughcoughArcturuscoughcough). As for Dimmu Borgir, they´re done. They can´t come up with a cohesive song anymore, and they can´t make a song that isn´t corny anymore. Whatever happened to subtlety? The song is disorganized, messy, and generic, and I doubt the rest of the album will be much different.