Darkthrone – Old Star

Peaceville

It’s become something of a cliché to say “I like their early stuff”, but in Darkthrone‘s case I don’t actually know a great deal of their recent stuff. I loved the first few albums, especially once they really hit their stride with Under A Funeral Moon (albeit with serious reservations about Varg Vikernes writing lyrics on “Transilvanian Hunger”), but wasn’t too keen on the direction they were going in after that, and they kinda dropped off my radar after The Cult Is Alive. On the strength of new album Old Star, that might have been a mistake.

My problem with The Cult Is Alive was that, for me, the particular combination of black metal and punk they were going for didn’t gel. It sounded wrong and messy. Darkthrone have always been a looser, more chaotic affair than many of their contemporaries, but on that album it seemed to leave too many gaps for the atmosphere to escape, and as a result didn’t have much. Old Star has a similar blend of styles, but here they pull it off FAR more effectively. The whole album is dripping with atmosphere. And it’s VERY metal.

Fenriz (drums, and also about the only really likeable subject of the black metal documentary Until The Light Takes Us) has gone on record as saying he wanted a very 1980s metal sound — and they’ve got one, but it doesn’t sacrifice any of the darkness. Nocturno Culto‘s vocals are bang on, growling their way through a relatively short set of relatively long songs. Don’t let the track listing fool you — there is a lot of metal here for your money.

Although they’ve not really been classic black metal for a long time, opener “I Muffle Your Inner Choir” is full-fat old-skool BM, melodic shredding and all, but with a more Motörhead-esque speedy element from Fenriz’s frenzied drumming. This is followed by “The Hardship Of The Scots”, which is basically just metal as fuck, and features one of the album’s catchiest riffs as Sabbath and Maiden get pissed at Celtic Frost‘s house and produce something that rocks HARD across its various movements. It’s a proper banger, and not just of heads. “No bastard rule of religion, soil surrounds the stone” growls Culto as Fenriz beats the shit out of his kit.

Title track “Old Star” is a far sludgier affair, until it breaks out into its more open passages and almost becomes what I like to imagine as “triumphant black metal” (kinda like triumphant post-rock, but for metal, with fanfare riffs that rip the heavens asunder). “Half-hearted black-hearted rams / Interstellar fugitives doing their bit for the universal dam” — on paper you could be forgiven for thinking this was something by Sleep, but there’s no sleep for Darkthrone on “Alp Man”, as the guitars chug and wail. If there’s anything they share with the stoner titans, it’s their love of solid riffage, which is well in evidence here.

The oddly-titled “Duke Of Gloat” isn’t, as you might imagine, a smugger version of “Duke Of Earl”, but a return to the Motörhead-do-black-metal style of “I Muffle Your Inner Choir”. This isn’t so much music for burning churches as music for driving at unwise speeds. If they still played live, there’d be injuries in the moshpit for sure. And we close out with “The Key Is Inside The Wall”, which starts off heavy and just keeps increasing in density. Like the rest of the album, it masters that old Darkthrone magic of sounding simple while actually being very complex. The traditional stuff about stigmata of Satan and morbid kaleidoscopes is welded to probably the other catchiest riff on the album as the lads shift from doom to speed to black at the drop of a pentagram.

Overall, Old Star‘s quite a trip. All the darkness you’d hope for welded to some good-time rock and roll. It’s about as metal as it gets. This is an album built on riffs. In a forest. You should buy it. And me? I should buy the last decade’s worth of Darkthrone.

-Justin Farrington-