DARKTHRONE: It Beckons Us All (BLACK METAL): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

Despite more than thirty-five years, Darkthrone continues to preach the good word at the steady rate of one album every two years, which even leaves time for Nocturno Culto and Fenriz to make infidelities to their main home port. The year 2024 is proving to be a busy one, with the former soon releasing a new Sarke album ("Endo Feight") and the latter participating in the first Coffin Storm opus ("Arcana Rising"). And then there's "It Beckons Us All", Darkthrone's 21st album.

Sure, original black metal is a long way off, but the Norwegians don't give a damn. Devilish punks, they've always given the finger to all the malcontents and sourpusses who criticize them for evolving (in their own way, that is!). However, you'd have to be deaf or incorrigibly dishonest not to admit that the records they've been grinding out over the last ten years, in a heavier, proto-doom vein, are far more exciting than the otherwise effective "Sardonic Wrath" (2004), "The Cult Is Alive" (2006) or "Circle The Wagons" (2010).

The successor to "Astral Fortess" sinks even deeper into a gloomy, ponderous crevice, giving it the air of an old, antediluvian doom album, as illustrated by "The Bird People Of Nordland", trapped in an oil slick, which doesn't preclude some brutal accelerations, or even more so the terminal 'The Lone Lines Of The Lost Planet', whose ten minutes are initially surprisingly melodic, almost syrupy, and then numb in the funereal way of 90s doom death. Early Paradise Lost or Celestial Season are not far off. Surprisingly, sparse backing vocals appear from time to time, but the atmosphere remains as cold and sinister, while the guitars retain their typically black metal grain, as witness the crepuscularly rough 'Black Dawn Affiliation', whose riffs are like icy bites in the skin.

With the handbrake firmly on (the pachydermic 'The Heavy Land' never gets past the second gear) and a few oddly cosmic touches (the intro to 'Howling Primitive Colonies') aside, "It Beckons Us All" is nonetheless pure Darkthrone, primal and rocky, nocturnal and mineral, as if from the depths of time. Even more than its recent predecessors, it inoculates a haunting venom thanks to heavy, epic compositions, shrouded in a black psychedelia as frozen as a dead star, whose morbid, stellar ambiences summon up the old SF of the 60s and recall the distant electronic escapades on the borders of the Berlin School of Fenriz's defunct Neptune Towers. - Official website

DARKTHRONE

IT BECKONS US ALL

PEACEVILLE RECORDS

BLACK METAL