In the world of no frills black metal, you shouldn't be expecting any of those non-warrior innane things like backing female vocals, pretty keyboards, flutes, cellos or even kazoos. In fact, it's best to be as monochromatic as possible, from the album cover to the actual sound of the music. In that regard, Gorgoroth's Under the Sign of Hell is extremely effective in actually musically portraying their cover art, as their sound is a collage of blacks, whites and shades of gray with nary a blue or red anywhere in the sound. In other words, this is Black Metal, with capital letters.

Though a lot of bands try to pull off this sort of controlled chaos, Gorgoroth actually succeeds here. Yes, I think Black Metal (with the capital letters) is a limited genre and there is only so much you can do within the blitzkrieg tempos and riffing before you run out of ways to string blast beats and speedy riffs together. Fortunately, our friends in Gorgoroth were able to string a lot of interesting pieces together. The music is extremely harsh in the neatest possible sense, with vocals coming from the lacerated throat of someone we must assume has troll in his ancestory. Much of the musical sound comes from the high end, trebly style that black metal has always dwelled within, as well as a hint of 80s Euro-thrash for good measure. Naturally the production is non-existent. This is the type of music you record, not polish up. None of the songs stick out from the crowd to any major degree (though the slick speed rush of "The Rite of Infernal Invocation" is particularly yummy), but on a whole the album is cohesive and takes the listener on a pretty darned nifty ride.

While perhaps not as genre defining as early Darkthrone or as well known as Immortal, Gorgoroth does make themselves a worthy footnote with Under the Sign of Hell, a definite recommendation for those who prefer the uglier side of black metal.

Review by John Chedsey

Review date: 08/2000

Back to top 

Talk about pointless. Gorgoroth's foray into brutal, primitive black metal just isn't anything worth writing to Hades over. The problem with playing fast-paced, blunt black metal is that speed only allows you so much room to work with and unless you're a brilliant songwriter, the result is going to be quite blah. Much of Destroyer has a hastily thrown together feel, as if the members of the band improvised riffs on the spot, threw some random beats together, and called it a song. Matched with the presumably deliberate trebly production, it just comes across as amateurish. Admittedly, I have heard worse metal in my life, but at the same time, I've heard many many other things that are better. When you hear the speedfest of "The Devil, the Sinner and His Journey", you're not going to be very impressed with the flat riffage or the blast beats because you've heard it all before under a much better songwriting umbrella. For whatever reason, Nuclear Blast has picked up these guys but trust me when I say you can do much better.

Review by John Chedsey

Review date: 04/1999

Back to top 

Gorgoroth's Incipit Satan is a competently played collection of medium-to-fast speed black metal.

Review by Rog "the Frog" Billerey-Mosier

No, that's not fair.

They use keyboards sparingly, which sometimes recall the soundtrack to a silent horror movie (I was almost expecting Bela Lugosi to come kill me when I heard the intro to "Unchain my Heart" - thankfully not a black metal version of the classic rock song of the same name). The singer sometimes speaks some Nordic tongue in a spooky voice over detuned guitar riffs blatantly stolen from Bathory's third and fourth albums ("Litani til Satan"). There's even an ambient piece ("Will to Power", in which the aforementioned Nordic singer mutters and yells backwards, as he does in "When Love..."). And "When Love Rages Wild in my Heart" has the very same Nordic singer croon (off key at times) like the bastard offspring of an orgy attended by Glenn Danzig, Peter Steele and Jim Morrison. It seems that the producer found a piece of outboard gear that had previously been covered by goat-cheese-and-infant-pepperoni pizza and went all-out with whiz-bang tricks which, to his (her?) credit, were once considered novel, such as backwards speech and spoken word bits.

If you can find it for $1 as I did, it's not *really* a waste of money. Whether it's a waste of your time is up to you.

Review by Rog The Frog Billerey-Mosier

Review date: 09/2000

Back to top