Track Listing
1. Master of disguise 2. Ad astra 3. The chaos path 4. La masquerade infernale 5. Alone 6. The throne of tragedy 7. Painting my horror 8. Of nails and sinners Year: 1997 Label: Misanthropy - Official Site |
Arcturus - 'La masquerade infernale' - By C. Diamantis
I was very reluctant about writing a review of this album. Its perfection and magnificence are such that cannot easily be described by words. However, me being in an unusually good mood, I decided to give it a try. This the second album from the all-star band from Norway and while their debut album, �Aspera Hiems Symphonia�, was an extremely good example of atmospheric black metal, nothing really prepared the audience for this continuation. But lets start from the simple facts. Arcturus are : Garm (vocals), Hellhammer (drums), Sverd (keyboards), Knut M. Valle (guitars), and Hugh Stephen James Mingay (bass). Every person who has even the smallest knowledge of black metal surely recognizes at least some of the names. For those who don�t, I must say that you definitely need an extensive revision. Other participants included, Simen Hestnaes doing vocals in some songs, Carl August Tidemann who contribute a few guitar solos, a quartet of strings and a couple of other musicians. This is a very loose concept album, since a lot of the songs are dealing with the Faustian idea of the Devil. The band also chooses to use a poem of E.A. Poe in one of the songs, �Alone�, and a translated version of the poem �Tragediens Trone� by Jorn Henrik Svaeren in another. In the credits of the album it doesn�t state who exactly wrote the lyrics, but my guess (and a pretty safe one) would be that the responsible for them is Garm (or G. Wolf as is the name he uses in the album). And now we arrive at the hardest part of this review, the music of this album. It has some of the structures of black metal, but as a whole is much more than that. Arcturus combine the past and the future in this album. In one song we have a totally symphonic approach (like in the almost instrumental �Ad Astra�), in another we can see that the band flirts with the present day electronc music (like in the also instrumental �La Masquerade Infernale�). Loops, noise backgrounds, guitar solos and symphonic melodies blend harmonically and create one of the best and most intelligent albums ever to come out in rock music. Once again in this album, Garm shows us how talented a singer he is, giving to the songs a totally theatrical dimension. Simen Hestnaes gives the best performance of his life in �The Chaos Path�, a song so magnificent that if you don�t like it, you must really check your nervous system, because something is very, very wrong. Hellhammer appears in a totally different role than the one he�s used to, since in this album his drumming is mostly mid-tempo, but once again proves that he is probably the best drummer in black metal today. The keyboards of Sverd, ever present, create an atmosphere that enchants the listener, unlike a lot of other so-called �atmospheric� bands which can only cause laughter with the use of keyboards in their albums. And of course the guitar work on this record is very good, something uncommon in most black metal bands, and this happens because both Valle and Tidemann are very talented musicians. If you�re one of those people that thinks genre's are essential in music, then you're lost. The music of Arcturus is just too big to fit in a single genre. Rock, metal, trip-hop, noise, symphonic music are just parts of what Arcturus create. Black metal for the next century? Definitely not. Music of the next century is more accurate. There is just one thing for you to do now. Go to your closest record store, buy this album, and find out what perfection sounds like. Albums like this are the main reason music is considered to be an Art, with a capital A. Metal Obsessive Grade: 100% |