The Formative Years – Darkthrone
No matter if you think you like what is commonly described as black metal, I dare you to listen to Darkthrone’s dense and hard hitting 1992 record A Blaze in the Northern Sky as it remains a unique and genre coining record that has to offer so much more than shock value, open-handed clusters of minor chords and tremolo-picked single-note leads.
While Fenriz remained adamant about using cheap equipment, the clear production creates an unpolished, deliberately primitive and radically simplistic atmosphere that conveys an eerily dark energy, which is only further enhanced by the sombre vocal delivery that punctuates the distortion and steady blast beats. Quintessentially, the album is a nightmarish collage.
Darkthrone never set out to reinvent the wheel and while their brand of sonic assault defied categorizations back in the day, they carefully curated and calculated the ingredients the gnarly, seemingly dilettantish total of which result in something much bigger than what the individual components could be summed up to.
While A Blaze in the Northern Sky is not remotely near my fave Darkthrone emissions, it blew my mind when I came across it the first time in the mid '90s.
An album that feels like a musical artifact of a troubled time and place and one that successfully brings a vision to life.
