Written by Baazgor

Are you fucking high, Beherit?

Let me preface this by saying that I’m not going to turn this into a twenty page dissection on the principles of philosophy, or theory, or approach or semantics. Some people aren’t going to like what I’m going to say and they probably won’t agree with me. That’s totally okay. I don’t have the time and space to turn this into a small novel in regards to why I rated this album the way I did and I know somewhere on this awesome planet, some Beherit fan boy is going to shit his pair of solid-black jockey briefs over this thing. Relax. All things considered before I wrote this, the old material is great, this isn’t. The concept attempts to remain the same, but there are several elements that don’t turn up that really left me with a bad impression with this album. Von, Havohej, and Ildjarn were one thing, this isn’t it. This is what I gauge my review on, relevance to a band’s history, there particular section of sound and what has come before, is here and will come in terms of the global metal community.

Beherit’s previous works ‘The Oath of Black Blood’ and ‘Drawing Down the Moon’ were some of the early 1990’s greatest black metal albums. Its influence was spread about, powered by the material’s sheer deconstructive mentality. Those albums were messages spoken from an ancient tongue whose songs were less so, and more of apocalyptic bursts of sheer noise and basic, primal information. Albums whose worth is greatly disputed, even after nearly two decades.

Clearly, Beherit’s new full length, ‘Engram’, recognizes it’s source of origin, and attempts to return to that forsaken wasteland of auditory canyons and deserts, only to harbor itself within an artificial utopia somewhere far outside of those previous mentioned territories. Within that bubble, was spawned ‘Engram’. Unlike the contested previous works of the group, ‘Engram’s worth will not be questioned years down the road.

As a whole, I am pretty disappointed in this album, for numerous reasons. Ultimately, there are several good moments in this album but realistically that means nothing. Nobody listens to an album for a couple of good moments, people listen to records for either a couple of good tracks or, hopefully, because it’s just a good record. There is little to return to on ‘Engram’. Compared to previous Beherit releases, ‘Engram’s production places less value on the low end spectrum, dodging the thick, formless bottom end properties of ‘Drawing Down the Moon’ for a more…dare I say it…cleaner production. That’s not to say that ‘Engram’ was processed beyond reasoning at some souped up recording studio for months on end but it’s made significantly less harmless when pitted against both the band’s prior work and their contemporaries in the genre today. Most importantly, the song writing as a whole is just…boring…this is the gay younger brother of ‘Drawing Down the Moon’, throwing a wild temper tantrum over nothing in an attempt to vainly try and accomplish everything.

The riffs here aren’t memorable, which is an absurd statement. Again, returning to the band’s early material (there is a reason for all of this), which was composed of simple riffs, often comprised of slower power chords or tremolo picked sequences that were often fashioned in jarringly tight combinations or sequences musically, ‘Engram’ in turn just literally beats the same song-specific set of riffs into the ground, minute after minute. The tracks start, progress and end with very little variation…’Destroyer of Thousand Worlds’ is one riff repeated for the ENTIRE LENGTH of the song with Holocausto shouting over top of it. At one point, there is another guitar track that comes in…to play the same exact riff. Sorry, but I’m really going to have to question what the point of that was, and how somebody writing an album could even come up with a spot in the song for that to happen. How is that decided? Why? It’s a pointless song; completely, completely pointless. This is like Tivo’ing static and canceling your plans for the night to make popcorn and watch it two times in a row with your cat. Not good. What makes it even worse is that the majority of the album is like this.

With that being said, all bands that play minimalist or deconstructionist metal often bear a signature characteristic of repetitive musical ideas or simple song structure. Alone, that character makes survival at a musical level a very difficult thing. What separates the shit bands from the talent is the ability to take the prior mentioned repetitive musical ideas and simple song structures and brace them at every angle, either through production (by shaping atmosphere), or well-conceived sonic layering. Both articles fail to make an appearance on ‘Engram’. The production employs the same values as…well, the vast majority of most of the records coming out today. Ultra slick, meaty guitar tones, tightly controlled drums, and just enough compression to dull any thing remotely resembling a sharp edge in the sound. This might be perfectly ok any where else but for a record that has this type of compositional value, it just doesn’t go well.

Not everything is worth avoiding here though. ‘All in Satan’ is a straight forward blaster with a weird synthesizer melody flickering faintly in the background towards the middle of the song that serves as a odd garnish to a track that recklessly barges through. ‘Pimeyden Henki’ is one of my personal favorites, starting with a more ambient intro section and is interlaced with more ‘open’, slower riffs littered throughout. ‘Suck My Blood’ is another decent track because it has a pretty good opening riff, it’s a little more up-tempo than the other songs, and Holocausto sounds like he’s actually singing in Beherit and towards the final one third, we get a bit of a cock tease in regards to what this album could have been, and believe me, this thing could have been a hell of a lot better. Songs like these prove that the band still has the capacity to create good black metal, clearly though, something didn’t add up.

Overall, I probably won’t actually listen to this again. A band with this type of history is a band I tend to judge more heavily than others and ‘Engram’, both in relation to the band’s earlier material and what’s being released today, just doesn’t cut it. The intent is there, but the ideas have some clear rusting around the edges. Beherit has the ability to make hypnotic, ritualistic black metal, so it’s clearly a disappointment that this release, its atrophied musical husk, serves as a pitiful, weak return.

At this point I’ll suggest not obtaining this album. If you’re new to Beherit, you’ve obviously read my words on ‘Drawing Down the Moon’ and ‘The Oath of Black Blood’, I would suggest getting a hold of ‘Beast of Beherit: Complete Worxxx’, which is a best-of compilation spanning the band’s entire career. If you want raw, old-school style black metal, I wrote a review right before this for another Finnish band, Archgoat, for their newest full length ‘The Light-Devouring Darkness’, and that’s a much better album. I can’t stop fanboys from buying this, but I can convince the people who are less stone-skulled to not buy this.

Drink a glass of warm milk instead.

Final Score: 3.5/10

--Written by Baazgor (Andrew Krause) for Metaltome.com, July 20^th, 2009.

Written by :

Andrew Krause

 

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Andrew Krause said:

... Haha. Really, dude? I just happen to come here when I was drunk as fuck and not finding any good porn to look at and I finally got around to reading this comment you left. I'm not throwing anything serious out to someone who uses 'Chaosgoat' as a last name. I'm about tired of seeing shit like this on the internet. If I was looking for droning music 'to get high to', it wouldn't be Beherit. MZ.412, Hexenhaus, Arditi, maybe. But, I don't drop acid anymore, and I stopped snorting coke a few years ago. Point is, this album sucked. It was a review I wrote, hahaha, nearly two years ago. I still stand by it, and reading it over again, I laughed my ass off. This album was total garbage. I understand the whole 'minimalist' thing and 'Engram'...it sucked. I could rattle off ten albums off the top of my head that blew this pile of garbage off this stupid floating rock. I listend to it five or six times, wrote a review and then moved on to something else better to do with my time. The transistions between riffs and emotions? What? What??? Dude, 'Destroyer of Thousand Worlds' was one riff. One riff. There is no transition, you're argument, it's invalid. Emotion? What emotion? We are talking about minimalist black metal. Emotion in conjuction with Minimalist black metal, again, invalid argument. Counter review it. Give me some sort of a challenge, please. Please. My ass will be covered in corpse paint after I gingerly rub it up and down your face. If you want to claim that my review 'failed', don't go visit any other sites then, like the much overblown metal archives, COD, Visions, Obscurity, Circle of Destruction and so on and so forth, because you'll be busy countering plenty of people that agreed that this album was horrid. Knock yourself up, or out, or whatever, I might check back in another two years to monitor your progress. By the way, the ReCaptcha I had to type in to post this comment was 'Cry Harder', ironic, right?

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May 06, 2011
Votes: +0

Grev Chaosgoat said:

... this review fails. If you're looking for droning music to get high to, this album might fail you, but as far as being a quality black metal album that communicates exactly what it wants to, this album succeeds on so many levels. While the riffs don't have that much distinction, the transitions between riffs and the emotions evoked are all memorable. Or are you to high to hear it? I would like to do a counter review if time allows.

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April 11, 2011
Votes: -1

Eric said:

	... The One Sentence Review: Cruel. This is like a child who enjoyed riding a bike and then loses her legs in some tragic accident. This is the child, after the accident, in her garage, trying to climb back on the bike with her stumps wriggling about in a desperate attempt to not feel like a crippled failure and a burden on her family’s insurance premiums. Epic...
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October 21, 2009
Votes: +0

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