Lista de los grupos Symphonic Black Dimmu Borgir Abrahadabra

Once again I find myself getting into bands just as all their former fans are abandoning them. I'm a big fan of Vortex, and it was upsetting to hear of his departure from the band (as for Mustis, well, I guess you'd have to be a keyboardist/composer to recognize his skill). I felt that the new Dimmu Borgir would be less without him. And it was with bated breath that I waited for news of their latest release...

Then the single for "Gateways" came out...and the fans of Spiritual Black Dimensions began their troll-wars. Then the album came out, and many were wishing that the whole thing was better than that song with the chick who, in their words, sounded like Dani Filth.

At last, the new album was unleashed. And even more hate came because of the new direction the band was taking aesthetically. Just because they wear white doesn't mean they're not black metal anymore. Shagrath still sports his inverted crucifix and Galder and Silenoz still have their pentagrams emblazoned onto their white garb. Possibly the most retarded trolling the band has received in regard to this album is Shagrath's head-gear, which looks like the front of the album. Honestly, have you even read Lovecraft? Silenoz said that the mask on the cover is based on Lovecraft's old gods, who, in his words, see the existence of man as the blink of an eye. This fits in well with the eerie, post-apocalyptic settings of their videos, and one should not be ripping on Shagrath's Ktulu-inspired head-gear.

Okay, now to the album.

After a brief intro, the album picks up with "Spiritual Black Dimensions Treacherous." Apart from an epic chorus chanting, the symphony, Daray's brutal drumming and the audio-byte, which just might be the most evil man himself - no, not Gaahl, Aleister Crowley, this album is Crowley as well as Lovecraft - its a good start to the album.

Now the dreaded single. The chorus' intro to the song is chilling, not to mention the once-again over-dominating symphony and a guitar track that has been, once again, pushed to the back. It's about rebirth - the rebirth of life on earth of the old gods once man has gone, and the rebirth of the most famous black metal band ever. For as much as people want to rip on Agnete Kjølsrud, her part towards the conclusion of the track is perhaps the most hauntingly epic. But wait...this song has satanic connotations. "Be the broken or the breaker" stands out to me as one such line, though there are others, of the satanic connect of this song: obviously, the band is still Dimmu Borgir at heart, even in white clothing.

Track number five. Every band needs a theme song. Black Sabbath has Black Sabbath, Heaven and Hell had Heaven and Hell, Iron Maiden has Iron Maiden, etc. "Dimmu Borgir" is almost Viking in its epic feeling. The symphony works wonders along with the chorus and Silenoz's lyrics, which have references to the recent members who were removed ("We'll weed out the weak and their weep", "Talent is worthless unless exercised", etc.). Around 4:10, the song suddenly takes on a feel like a track from In Sorte Diaboli.

Now let's skip down to the tenth track, with the theme of rebirth that has carried through this album coming to its proper "Endings and Continuations." The symphony, of course, takes the lead, Galder and Silenoz just beneath audibility and Daray pounding his way through the "supreme unknown." After a portion that sounds very "old school black metal", the chorus takes up the magic chanting of Aleister Crowley: Abrahadabra (which has nothing to do with Harry Potter, thank you very much...retards). Then, we hear a melodic voice taking up his aria. Garm can put his talent wherever he wants to: he is not limited to just Arcturus or just Ulver, and though he is not a permanent member, his aria is the most epic thing on this album. Agnete Kjølsrud sings a soft, melodic interlude with the band (no screeching, I promise), and a slide guitar solo wails its way into black metal history.

So far I've just spoken of three or four members. Well, now let's get to the bonus track and I'll mention the guest star of this outfit: veteran of Therion, King Diamond and Mercyful Fate...Snowy Shaw. His part has been pretty much throughout the good part of the album, though, for some reason, he chose not to remain with the band. On the second bonus track, a Deep Purple cover (once again proving that Dimmu Borgir is a worthy band, since they can play regular music that is form-based and skillful), we get a chance to hear Snowy Shaw in all of his Dio-impersonating glory. That's how he sounds on "Chess With the Abyss", "Ritualist" and "Renewal." As for the track itself, though it holds no candle before "Burn in Hell" and "Black Metal", I was shocked at how boring and bland the original was in comparison to this.

In conclusion, yes...the symphony does overpower the metal. But that is the risk when playing with a real symphony, as we saw with Metallica's S&M live album. A lot of the tracks that Snowy sings on are very repetitive, except for "Chess With the Abyss" and "Perfect Strangers." Though it might not be the way of narrow-minded, underground "trve kvlt" black metal, the fact that Dimmu Borgir can sing and play about more than just the old Satan-n-spikes shit, and well at that, means that they are a force to be reckoned with. The compositions for the symphony are well done (I'm sorry, Mustis-fans, if I seem too neglectful of him. I'm not much of a keyboardist myself, so I can't comment on how hard it is to compose such masterpieces as he did), and I never thought I'd hear myself say that I like this album even though ICS Vortex isn't on it (you will be missed, though).

I think Dimmu Borgir should have the final say, though...

"People can say what they want, but we don't give a fuck."

There’s something particularly bothersome with disliking a Dimmu Borgir album these days, and it’s something I discovered while browsing the far reaches of the internet. I ended up talking to a metalhead who, after a while, mentioned Dimmu Borgir’s new album, Abrahadabra, to me. He asks me if I had heard the single off it, called Gateways. I told him I didn’t like it. Before I can even begin to say why, he leaps at me, accusing me of being ‘closed-minded’ and that I just can’t accept a band who wants to ‘evolve’ their music. I’m sorry but… I dislike Dimmu Borgir’s newest release and failure has nothing to do with them evolving, it has more to do with them regressing. They just don’t have very much range anymore, musically or otherwise, and as far as I’m concerned, they haven’t ‘evolved’ or changed very much since Death Cult Armaggedon, although their songwriting has noticeably deteriorated since then, while their cheesiness has increased. What you get out of all that is Abrahadabra.

Abrahadabra is Dimmu Borgir's most recent album, an orchestrated symphonic metal album that Dimmu Borgir threw a bunch of money at in an attempt to make something completely new to Dimmu Borgir. Well, it just isn't good. Not at all. It isn't as bad as In Sorte Diaboli, though. That’s the one thing I think every Dimmu fan can agree on. Thank God it isn’t another In Sorte Diaboli… thank God. But really, that isn't saying much. I can say that Dimmu Borgir was right in saying that Gateways is one of the lesser songs from the album. It is. The rest of the album isn’t really very different, except that the female vocalist only gets to ruin that one song. Anyway, you can tell pretty much right away that Dimmu have gone all out this time around, hiring a choir and orchestra that has a grand total of over 100 members.

How do these extras do in the album? Well, they sure as hell don’t act like hire-ons. The first think I think about them with this album is that they’re all consuming. I could tell almost right from the start of Xibir (and remembering what Gateways sounded like). They just swallow everything almost all the time. Everything else in the production comes second. They almost totally dominate the music. I think the way they had the orchestra situated in PEM was much better. It didn’t swallow Dimmu Borgir, it eccentuated the music. It worked, at least somewhat. Here, it feels like you’re playing a classical CD while playing Death Cult Armageddon on another player…with the volume on the classical CD turned way, waaaay up.

As for the actual band members, I don’t think they’re quite as impressive as the choir and orchestra. Namely those guitars. Dammit, Silenoz, you can do better than that! If chugging was behind you in 1995, why are you doing so much of it now? There are some nice solo sections and single-note melodic bits here and there, but they’re pretty flat. Not only that, but they’re pretty low in the production. I think if the guitars were higher in the mix, even a little higher than the orchestra and choir, a lot of the overall sound of the album would fall in to place, at least somewhat. The drums are pretty friggin good and it’s clear that that Daray guy certainly knows his way around a drum kit. They don’t have a ton of range on them, like previous Dimmu albums going for sheer speed rather than style, but they are still very satisfying. It would be nice if they weren’t so high in the mix, because they seem to consume a lot of the sound. The synths… well, they’re corny. Goofy. Sometimes annoying. But to me, that’s nothing new from Dimmu. Again, there’s a lot of instrument-clashing in this album. At times it seems like there’s too many different sounds being piled on top of each other, making the sound a tad sloppy. Again, I feel like the band is taking toomany ideas at once and trying to articulate them in a good way, but not succeeding very well.

Another problem is that Abrahadabra doesn’t seem to be a new Dimmu album…not really. Although they said they were going for something different, they really meant “Let’s see what happens when we simplify a lot of stuff from Death Cult Armageddon and stick a big choir and orchestra in there (which Dimmu Borgir has done once before, only difference is they used a smaller orchestra on P.E.M. The atmosphere just isn’t there, the raw emotion just isn’t there, and when I finished the album I felt like a lot of the concepts of the album came off as weak. Not to mention the production is sterile and souless, you feel like the sound of the album could have come off an assembly line. There’s not much difference between this album and Death Cult… except this one is glossier and less cohesive, I suppose.

Now, let's talk about the band members that left the band before the recording of Abrahadabra. A lot of Dimmu Borgir fans have been flaming the poop out of each other about the departure of Mustis and Vortex. Well, here's what I think of it... there isn't too much of a difference. The synths sound very similar to how they did on In Sorte Diaboli, and Vortex, as I said in my Gateways review, is better off lending his awesome vocals to a better band. (GET BACK IN ARCTURUS!) Anyway, I think Vortex's vocals would have been wasted on this mess. His bass would be incredibly hard to hear. I don't think Dimmu Borgir is better off without them, but if they were on this album, there would be nothing worth contributing. This album couldn't have been saved with or without them.

So okay, the Dimmu album still hasn’t sruck any particular chords for me. It just doesn’t seem that different from previous Dimmu Borgir releases, despite Dimmu’s desperate attempt at making the album diverse from everything else they’ve done before. Sure, it’s clear that Dimmu put a ton of work into this, but it’s an average album at best. The strings come off as corny, and contrast with everything else that’s being pushed at you. The atmosphere just isn't there, and the production is mechanic and lifeless. Sure there’s some awesome drumming, a cool solo section here and there, and I gotta give em points for trying… although I sorta condemn them for the incohesive way they did it, the way Dimmu seemingly threw everything but the kitchen sink at this album without organizing it… and the fact that I think Dimmu had the right idea buried somewhere in there. This album had potential, but it just fell flat. If you hated In Sorte Diaboli, you’ll be relieved by this, because it is much better than that pile of Dimmu doo-doo. If you expect TTLY BROOTAL BLACK METAL, well… come on. The band hasn’t released real black metal since Enthrone Darkness Triumphant. They aren’t even trying to reach that audience anymore. They’re trying to reach the Dimmu Borgir audience. I think Dimmu is trying to reach a goal of a perfect album, (after For All Tid and Stormblast) that has a more accessible flair to it, and isn’t as… raw. So far, they’re pretty far off the mark… doubtful they can pull it together.

Whether you’ll have to plunder the sanity of the insane, your defenseless soul to be entwined by chaos, be chased by the Black shepherds behind the curtains of the night or simply to take a walk through the plains of nightmare…forever, a Dimmu Borgir album is not just compilation of phenomenal songs, yet a string of sinister and hardly explicable events which there’s no way for you to forget ‘till the end of your mortal life. It might be namely this fact that transmuted them into the most commercially successful, equally respected and abused black metal band, yet also turned into a standard of killer composing, originality and vigorous creative power. The tendency towards opening the minds wider and wider from an experimental point of view and developing the sound to an ungodly measure gave result in series of colossal works that started with ‘Stormblast’. It also gave a mighty push to the whole stream of pale, blood-stained heretics who started to search for the melody and the atmosphere in their dark, supremely aggressive music more often, while people were reached by the news of this new subgenre in metal that called summoned fire and poison far away from the limits of the frozen North.

The career of Dimmu Borgir is an example for breaking the patterns; an unending upsurge, certified in productions in the rank of ‘Death Cult Armageddon’, considered by the majority who survived the crisis of that type of music to be the most apocalyptic effort coming out of the mysterious galleries of the Dark Castle. With ‘In Sorte Diaboli’, the following assault against Christianity and all of it’s canons was started along with the so called emancipation – a flight form all stylish frames, founding it’s most logical continuation in ‘Abrahadabra’ where the band is almost completely tearing its link with the black metal. I say ‘almost’, because although this is not a black album to begin with, in songs such as the vicious ‘A Jewel Traced Through Coal’ the schemes can be easily found and the entire suggestion is for darkness, alarm, paranoia. That’s complex, snake-twisting record, which power and energy are streaming out of the general mood and detail.

The conception, even though its nothing new due to the former collaboration with the Prague philharmonic orchestra, is again turning out to be very suitable for a band like Borgir, which has always had serious deviation to the symphony and its interaction with the norsk radio orchestra and the professional choir Shcola Cantorum, carried out under masterful conducting of the composer Gaute Storaas whose skills are truly impressive. ‘Abrahadabra’ is filled with dramatic arrangements, wild orchestrations and epic, densely layered melodies that just like sickness wedge into the soul, obsess, shake and almost shatter it to little peaces. It is a pleasure to note the fact that the audio space in such scales almost succeeds to substitute Mustis’s chilling piano passages, but we can’t say the same for the clean vocals which seldom use cannot re-create the shaking feelings that accompanied ICS Vortex’s epic voice.

That doesn’t reflect neither the ceremonial atmosphere in ‘The Demiurge Molecule’, nor the guitar explosions, caused by Silenoz and Galder in ‘Renewal’, not to mention the hopelessness and occultism in the epic final ‘Endings And Continuations’ which every priesthood without any doubt would stigmatize even from the interlude beginning where you can catch some disturbing, indescribable slimy sounds.

It’s already a fact – Dimmu Borgir is not a black metal band anymore, but it’s certainly ready to face the serial tsunami of negative reactions and betrayal accusations. To what? To the genre they made famous?

The legislators of chaos made it clear that they wouldn’t give up following their own vision despite of all and risks and sacrifices just as the most important thing for them is to have freedom over their creative minds and decisions. Liberty. Wasn’t this the sense of Satanism?

Remember when Shagrath told us to enter the supreme unknown in their press release for the album? Well, it looks like he's possibly the biggest liar I've ever heard of. Where most bands with talent would emphasize on said talent and progress into a powerful force of a band, Dimmu Borgir have decided to just re-tread their same old style - but this time, slathered it in orchestral wankery, over-production, and over-complicated and tedious songwriting. No place like home, I guess.

I guess this album proved one thing, and that's that the members who were fired really didn't contribute that much - because this is just status-quo Dimmu Borgir. I think the loss of their members have given them a sense of vengeance, wanting to prove to Vortex and Mustis that they can drive Dimmu Borgir forward without them - but this immature and silly attitude has done no good for the music at all. What Dimmu Borgir have done is over-complicate their songwriting and slather everything in a tedious and overused orchestra that adds absolutely nothing redeemable to their sound, and instead, takes from it. It makes everything sound far too busy, it's a headache to behold.

Of course, all the rest of the aspects are just Dimmu Borgir doing what they do best - which is milking their old formula until it's practically a raisin. But this time, they've thrown some money at an orchestra thinking it would improve the overall sound. This doesn't succeed well. For instance, they were trying to go for a dramatic introduction to the song "Dimmu Borgir" - but it ends up sounding like something out of the first scene of the Lion King, and the whole song just sounds like a metal cover of The Lion King (but worse).

You can hear a choir in almost every song here which makes the choir, which is admittedly well performed (mostly), lose all impact and emotional pull by the time you get to track four. The choir sometimes, however, is absolutely awful. Such as in the closing track, Endings and Continuations. The songs that are just pure orchestra, like the introduction Xibir, just sound bland and forced. Most of the actual work here is in the orchestra rather than the black metal tendencies. The drums are just there, they don't really do anything exciting other than drive the music forward - which would be fine if the music was actually engaging and well written, but again, it's just milking their old formula.

There are moments here I like, such as the last minute of Gateways and some short bits of the song Dimmu Borgir - but as you can guess, those moments are short lived. The rest can be heard before if you listen to In Sorte Diaboli. This has been the case with absolutely every Dimmu Borgir album - the bad moments drown out the good, and the good moments give me a glimmer of hope that they would decide to emphasize on the good moments instead of going with the same old. Then in the final stage, my hope dies a horrible and painful death. It's somewhat like the Sonic cycle, just with a bit of frostbite and grimness.

This album needs no review, because it's pretty cut and clean that Dimmu Borgir won't change - no matter what lineup changes occur. Shagrath's ego has claimed the Dimmu Borgir sound his hostage, and he has decided to throw five hundred orchestras at it. If you enjoyed In Sorte Diaboli (for whatever reason I can possibly fathom), well, yeah. You know the drill. Go and scream from the rooftops about your frostbitten soul. Don't forget to wear corpse paint, white suits and tassels! For those who thought In Sorte Diaboli was basically just bad black metal album with random aspects thrown at it hoping it would work, well, this album just follows that exact direction - apart from worse. This does exactly what the most recent Nightwish album did. Smothering your songs in a real orchestra does not make your music any more compelling or well written. Avoid.

(written for www.sputnikmusic.com)

Where to start?

I first watched the video for “Gateways” before I was able to listen to the album (Since it wasn’t being released in America for another month). Amid all the mixed opinions on You Tube comments I saw the song as a good step in the right direction, continuing a mature, modern style metal that understands true black metal is bordering 20 years old now. Personally I prefer very orchestrated music. I find straight out guitars, bass & blast beats to be boring when realized that all possible riffs for black metal have been exhausted by the 100,000 bands in the world that have sprung up since the days of black metal’s first birth in 1992(and sooner). But I digress…….

My other thoughts on the video and Dimmu’s new look was a slight shrug and “Meh”. I shook my head at the tub of blood with the chick in it. (First it was milk but then it became blood.) This was already done by Cradle Of Filth over a decade ago in “From Cradle To Enslave”. I never in a million years would have thought Dimmu would blatantly copy one of their longest standing rivals. This is something I would have expected to have been the other way around… now that I mention it, COF is sporting a member who’s trying too hard to look like Galder and their whole attire is very much a copy of Dimmu.
One can’t miss the female vocals that have now replaced Vortex in the song. Is this the same female vocalist COF used in their cover “Temptation”? Sure sounds like it.
Next we have Dimmu wearing mouthless masks and on an all white background. *sniff, sniff* I smell Behemoth for sure. One could easily suspect that both COF and Dimmu Borgir have been secretly eyeballing each other, as well as Behemoth, for ideas.

(I remove my review of the album after discovering what I was reviewing was NOT Dimmu Borgir's new album but a side project by Shagrath.)