DARKTHRONE - A Blaze in the Northern Sky (1992)

I tried introducing a review - this review, actually - by musing on the meaning of the greek word "entheos", which has bequeathed us "enthusiasm" as a lesser offspring, but in origin meant something far deeper; it's a word that comes to mind daily as I consider the transmission of energy and beauty through the artform of recorded music and metal. But someone already wrote up a pretty decent eulogy of the term ... and I would have become decisively boring as I tried to remedy your ignorance of such deep, classic meanings and words, duu-uude.

So let's ignore that I actually did start out with a paragraph dedicated to it. The reason I considered the ancient idiom specifically for A Blaze in the Northern Sky is fairly clear, at least to those with my lineage of taste; this is the best Norwegian black metal record, ever. Some prefer Transilvanian Hunger or Under a Funeral Moon, but in my ears this is the truest example of Darkthrone. It feels perfectly pure and untampered with, like it was blasted into existence true to its brave, cocky title, and the cover might even be called good photography if one considers its symbolic representation. My favourite T-shirt was of this cover, just black with three specks of vague detail and some text. They certainly kept up their (now legendary) trend, but never with the purity of Blaze.

I'm a sucker for excessive songs, and 6 tracks in 42 minutes sounds like my favourite ice cream flavour. I recently read a review pointing out that they probably started the album trend of seven-or-less "epic riff-bombarding" songs, where the duration is not justified by some lofty concept, but just a run-on barrage of great material punctuated with the art itself as free energy, accidentally recorded in the wilderness of genre lust; not encapsulated, accessible "pop" formats inherited from thrash metal. I dare say these songs have a natural excess, separated from the aforementioned pretenders of latter black metal waves by the fact that it's motherfucking Darkthrone's Blaze, ya heard. On one of their more recent, genre-bending releases, "Too Old Too Cold" said with the cocky arrogance of our darling Fenriz:

Nothing to prove

Just a hellish rock n' roll freak

You call your metal black?

Its just plastic lame and weak

We're too old, too cold

Too old and too cold

They deserve to flout their genre, to fuck around with people, to pretend they either were or were not Master Chieftains of black metal, cause they never engaged in ritualistic, "faggy" behaviour, but were so true metal that to this day, hearing "Kathaarian Life Code" gives me magical diesel fuel and inspires me just as it did when I first heard it at fourteen -- when, by the way and example, Dimmu Borgir records were growing from the air like plastic power-ups and early Darkthrone releases were hardly to be found, pissed on by Peaceville until the resurgence of vinyl as power-grabbing gatefold wizardry gave them "inspiration".

If you can't love A Blaze in the Northern Sky, I'll piss all over you if you're not on fire and staple you to a lamp post until you decay into a pile of false hopes.