Dissection - Night's blood
Ooookay, I'll take back every negative thing I've ever written about Dissection, this album is musically superior to pretty much any black metal album I've heard since before Borknagar's Epic or Immortal's At the Heart of Winter. I'm like the worst possible judge for this genre, since I'm not really a fan of any of these bands and think it's really hard to mosh to the rythm of anything in the genre, which severely degrades the whole metal experience. Especially, since the word "brutal" gets thrown around too often and and that's a surefire way to get the me interested, since generally in metal, the word "brutal" is often just a different way of saying that an album is "as groovy as a moose on steroids". The sad truth is; most black metal albums aren't.
Screeching and having a frigid sounding wall of guitars on your hands goes quite a ways to ensure metal enjoyment, but those things alone don't mean jack crap, if the album is just one storm of wails and guitar-wrecking soundwall. I know some folks get off on that crap, but I prefer more than a semblance of melody and rythm on my aural vices of choice. If I want a nonstop loop of grind, I'll go to a glue factory meat processing unit and mosh away. I call a Meh. Technicality and absolute bombastic epicness are great themes on where to build an album in a genre so retarded as metal, but they're like two fifths of what consists a great album. Groove(or jam), great rythm and sense of pace are often what's lacking here on the bm-side and no matter how ****ing "Norwegian" you think you are, your music is still brain-dead cacophony and guitar-wanking if the last three fifths of awesomeness are nowhere to be found.
Fortunately enough, Dissection's Storm of the Light's Bane has no lack of melody, pace and groove. Someone could whine about how it's "too melodic" or how the band members were a bunch of chaos magick pissants who tried to be eeeebil. True and true, but does this somehow degrade the album? I think not. Lyrics are lyrics and what does it matter if the lead man only hired guys who he thought were atheist enough, if the music really shines. He's dead and buried, but this stuff...damn this will live on. For the little jonn