1349’s Hellfire was pretty damn close to a perfect black metal album: nothing but top notch frostbitten riffs played at grindcore speed with Ravn’s lunatic vocals over them and production grimy enough to evoke the necessary rawness but not obscure the music at its heart. At once precise and uncompromising, the album eschewed the genre’s weak points and simply tore the guts out of whomever cared to listen. Much like Anaal Nathrakh, Hellfire was an example that I pointed to when people dismissed black metal as a poor/embarrassing man’s death metal.

Of course, this may be the bulk of the weight in my big ol’ bag of fucking disappointment with the band’s follow up to Hellfire, Revelations of the Black Flame. Just when the band were appearing to be brutal enough to ascend black metal’s negative connotations, Black Flame finds them taking an unfortunately masturbatory turn into the realm of avant-garde black metal, at once trying to challenge the norms and boundaries of black metal while embracing its most ridiculous aspects.

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