Having failed to recapture the magic of their early to mid 90’s heyday with lifeless and boring albums like “Ravishing Grimness” and “Plaguewielder”, Darkthrone realised they had to do something different in order to disguise the fact that they were an utterly spent force.

With all the thousands of bands copying their 90’s black metal style, Fenriz and Nocturno Culto decided to go back to their early youth and make novelty albums combining all their favourite 80’s metal bits into one easily digestible and forgettable meal of putrid mush.
“This’ll be really cool,” Fenriz thought. “We can have our own generic Eddie figure on the album covers, use silly song titles and have a real laugh while making money off of hipsters so as I don’t have to go and work in the post office again. Yeah, that’ll be totally boss.”

“Dark Thrones and Black Flags” (cute title by the way) continues where “F.O.A.D.” left off, in other words, by insulting the intelligence of metallers and delighting the irony-o-meters of hipsters with its self-referential, catchy punk metal that makes a lot of noise but says nothing. Each track zips by in a low production breeze of self-satisfied smugness (we could do better than this but we don’t care anymore), barely registering on the listener’s consciousness, much like pop music.

Whereas Darkthrone’s classic albums took their influences and remolded them into something new and evolving, here Fenriz and company are like babies playing with their own faeces. “Remember when this was Deathstrike?” 2 month old Fenriz says, his hands cupping some green sludge, “somehow it’s turned into poo. Oh well who cares, let’s send it to Peaceville, they can polish it up and sell it.”

Avoid this album at all costs. Having this CD on your shelf is the same as having a row of Star Wars toys in your bedroom. “Don’t you get it? It’s nostalgic and ironic.” Go die, as Fenriz would say.

Fenriz, drummer and songwriter with legendary Norwegian black metal band Darkthrone, yesterday issued a brief statement to Antihumanism.com via the band’s official myspace page.

In it, he angrily claimed that we were wrong for insisting seminal Darkthrone albums such as “Under a Funeral Moon” are far superior to more recent gimmicky efforts like “F.O.A.D.”.

He went on to state that he wrote and recorded the influential masterpiece, “Transilvanian Hunger”, in just two weeks, whereas it now took him two or three months to write a single track for poorly conceived travesties like “Dark Thrones and Black Flags”. ’90s black metal is easy and more or less for little kids’, he added.

Finally, in a John McEnroe style outburst of childish boo-hooing, he demanded that we ‘go die’.
 
In response, Antihumanism.com would like to say that, like Tom G. Warrior once did (before he saw sense), Fenriz has forgotten that it was the incredible and visionary music of his early years that founded his reputation and status in the international metal scene.
It is those classic albums that have remained firm favourites since the early 1990’s, while their latest releases will quickly fade into nothingness by 2010, once the novelty has worn off.

But while he still has new product to shift, Fenriz will sadly continue to dismiss his early work as mere juvenalia, rather than admit that he lost his way artistically many years ago.

There will be those who claim in their defence that ‘Darkthrone have always done what they want’. This is patently untrue, and also, condones the sort of liberal, destructive humanist behaviour that we at Antihumanism.com condemn utterly as the cancerous tumour at the heart of modern artistic endeavour and society as a whole.
‘Doing whatever you want’ is the mantra of businessmen who want you to consume and buy and act however you like, with no regard for the consequences of those actions because that brings them the greatest profit. This is not an ideology compatible with the early 90’s black metal of Darkthrone.   

To understand why ”Transilvanian Hunger” is hailed as a great work of art, while the likes of “Ravishing Grimness” are not, click here.