Emperor - IX Equilibrium (1999)

So I'm more of a death metal guy - the last three posts show that.  What can I say?  I prefer a chug that kicks me in the stomach and growls that sounds like a dragon burping.  Most black metal ends up sounding the same to me - a 14-year-old playing with his $45 keyboard set to "strings," guitarists constantly caught in the tremolo'd last note of a Who concert, a drummer who is legitimately having a seizure right now, and a cat being wrung out next to a microphone, all recorded with a cellphone and "mixed" in garageband.  I'm not hating on black metal - I love the shit.  I just gravitate towards death more than satan.

He just needs some corpse paint and he's good to go

That being said, Emperor holds a special place in my heart.  Is it because they were partially responsible for the church burnings that made Norwegian Black Metal such an iconic movement in metal history?  No.  Because their drummer Faust committed one of the most famous acts of violence in black metal history by murdering Magne Andreassen?  Hell no.  It's because of this fucking album.  


IX Equilibrium starts with my favorite song - "Curse You All Men" which intros with this horrendously terrifying high-pitched wail and jumps right into the catchiest lovely tremolo octave riff backed by just the most classic black metal drums played by Trym Torson (now with Abigail Williams, another black metal band that surprised the shit out of me).  The song has a lot of variety, jumping back and forth between actually pretty straightforward melody lines and just awesome, relatively atonal tremolo riff that just oozes evil.  There's also a healthy amount of synth backing in this track, although nothing compared to the rest of the album.  

Emperor, the black metal band with the perfect logo

This album may have thrown people for a loop when it was released; it's not much like other Emperor albums.  The production is excellent, which sets it apart from most black metal, and it uses a healthy amount of clean vocals, which is also relatively uncommon.  But the use of the corny synth and the constant, powerful scissor blasting with a clear ping ride on top of tremolo picked guitars makes this album unmistakeable: this is black metal, by black metal gods (or devils, whatever).  


There's a lot more development to this album than there had been to their last albums.  The clean production allows Emperor to take musical risks that simply aren't reasonable on a low-budget, lo-fi production budget, the biggest risk of which is that you can actually HEAR the different notes being played by the guitar.  But they really come through - you can't listen to the album without the unmistakable feeling of evil, and that's like the highest compliment you can give to a black metal band.  


So take it or leave it - it's definitely no Dying Fetus or Beneath the Massacre, but it's not supposed to be.  You might find something you like, like the sawblade sounding guitar in "The Warriors of Modern Death" or the ridiculous synth in "An Elegy of Icaros."  You can be fucking sure that Emperor will blast the shit out of you and leave you fetid and sagging like Travis Barker's tattooed shrimpdick.