Darkthrone-Panzerfaust

This right here is Darkthrone at their best. This is currently one of my favorite black metal albums of all time. My friend bought me this CD when I was in seventh grade, and I literally played it until the player was unable to read the disc. This was the album that introduced me to the wonders of Norwegian black metal. Many of my friends from where I live aren’t really fond of black metal mainly they think that all or most of the blast beat drumming that the drummers do all sound the same. I think that that statement is true in several cases, but there are quite a few black metal bands that have astonishingly creative drummers. Some of those bands include Darkthrone, Keep of Kalessin, Immortal, Dark Funeral, and Ceremonial Castings (although they aren’t pure black metal). Darkthrone has been around for such a long time, and have been so successful that they have become one of the most famous and loved black metal bands of all time, and hopefully their name will be remembered for decades to come.

My favorite thing about most black metal music is that the recording and sound quality is very low profile, raw, and almost (if not) completely unedited. Darkthrone is the best example of that. I cannot imagine Darkthrone’s music in a high quality sound. In this album, there are fewer songs about Satanism, Christian blasphemy, and evil, and there are more songs focusing on the wonders of nature, and forests. The vocals are quite distorted to match the guitars. I love the fact that nothing is too high pitched because I am generally sensitive to high frequencies that are very loud, so I prefer that recordings don’t have too much of anything (especially treble, but a lot of bass is good). Panzerfaust is the first Darkthrone album that uses a lot of simple guitar chords within the songs. Because in albums such as Transilvanian Hunger, and Under a Funeral Moon, the guitar chords are more sophisticated and juicy, which sounds very yummy. I would personally like the vocals to be a tad bit higher pitched because it sounds better to me if black metal vocals are more of a high pitched sound rather than a nasty yelling sound. But I will say that I’m not a person that thinks that all bands of a certain genre should have all of the same qualities; I actually love variety and experimentation within the bands.

I can’t find any songs on this album that I dislike, but I will note a couple of songs that could use some improvement. The guitar part in Quintessence is very boring and repetitive, the only thing about it that changes is the key every once in a while. My favorite song off of this album is definitely Triumphant Gleam. The speed of the song changes in various places which makes me confused on how this song should be making me feel and what emotions this song should give me. The lyrics in this song are actually very powerful if you study them a little, because at first they just seem like a compilation of random notes written down at different times. En Vind Av Sorg is Norwegian for A Wind of Sorrow. This song is very pretty and melodic which really distracts the mind from most of the other punkish, heavier songs. I would highly recommend this to all fans of black metal, and to people who are interested in discovering the astonishingly unique sound of raw black metal. This scores 19.5/20.