Excellent endeavor into the world of underground dark music
metalicist | 07/15/2000
(5 out of 5 stars)
"having recently become more and more interested in underground dark music and less and less interested in whatever the hell was playing on the radio, i've begun to use my music funding (6 bucks an hour really isn't so bad..) to buy underground metal compilation albums, mostly in the genres of gothic and black metal. This album was one excellent sampler of the artists of the artistic encouragement that are the Elfenblut and Misanthropy labels. Granted, these songs typically aren't the best by these artists, most are still excellent. What i really love about this album is it shows that you can have many styles of music by different artists on the same cd without things sounding disjointed. From the dark, bizarreness of Stormbringer and Beyond Dawn, both of which consist of odd synth and sampling coupled with oddly distributed guitar lines and vocals mixed between singing and spoken word, we then have the pagan metal of Primordial and Solstice, the raging abstractness of Burzum, the utter insanity of Mayhem, the ambient, beautiful violin and dreamlike female vocals of Amber Asylum, the pagan folk music of Hagalaz Runedance and the atmospheric floating of Monumentum and Aphrodisiac...along with a couple more excellent tunes which i don't have space to mention. While these may not be the best bands in their respective genres, this album is still an excellent trip into the dark, twisted and highly expressional realm of dark music...it just might change your life and your musical taste! It's completely impossible to compare music like this to ANYTHING in current popular music. If you're listening to any kind of pop music, rap, or mainstream rock, the truth is you have no musical taste whatsoever and are most likely a victim of image based, conformist society, which is exactly what this album is devoted to preventing! This music is true art and goes back to what music originally was, expression, and sure, the songwriting doesn't stack up against classical composers, and it will never have the aesthetic of most blues and rock musicians expressing themselves the same way, it truly is art, and blows away most garbage of the past thirty or so years. Enjoy!"
Track Listings (14) - Disc #1