I like A Blaze in the Northern Sky as much as the next person (Transilvanian who-now?), but Darkthrone albums are always hit or miss, despite their charm. Not being a mega-fan of the band, I personally find the band’s later period more interesting now that they’ve evolved into a mix of Candlemass-style doom metal, heavy metal, black metal and Celtic Frost-like proto-extreme metal. Old Star impressed me with its alternating urgency and hypnotic doom crawl, where the main riffs felt well though out with good hooks. Curiously, the long running band didn’t stop there. Eternal Hails…… (with its six dots) steered the band into more progressive writing and while it was a bit uneven, I enjoyed it. Astral Fortress, however, absolutely tanked my enthusiasm by being one of their blandest efforts in a good while. This album displayed the worst version of the last few albums, drawing riffs out while having no direction and overall making the music sound like it had little effort behind it. Not entirely so with new album It Beckons Us All……. (yes, we have progressed to seven dots this time). The album has a few fun ideas, featuring more of the goofy vocals of Gylve Fenris Nagell (Fenriz) than usual in the trilling “Eon 3” and closer “The Lone Pines of the Lost Planet”, and some upbeat heavy metal tracks like “Black Dawn Affiliation”. The best tracks are the snappy “The Heavy Hand” with its unhappily moaning Celtic Frost-guitars and “The Bird People of Nordland”, a song that goes from a mean second wave black metal riff to some very urgent synth backed riffing that traverses Black Sabbath, Celtic Frost and themselves in one go. Moments like this shows that the band still know their way around a good idea when it pops up.
Look, if you like Darkthrone you mostly know what you’re getting by now. Each album they release iterate on the same quirky sound that cares more about their interpretation of “the riff” than what is trending in metal today. What changes between albums is simply the degree to which they find themselves inspired and the light touches of off-beat ideas they add as spice. As far as that goes, It Beckons Us All is not a complete miss, but its better moments don’t quite measure up to albums like Old Star and Eternal Hails. There is a lot of time spent in songs like “Howling Primitive Colonies” and “The Lone Pines of the Lost Planet” to let the riffs breathe, but as they are very similar to the minute-to-minute moments of other recent Darkthrone albums, there is really no reason to pick this album over the more inspired ones. Songs drag where they should be better edited, in short. At this point the band does whatever they feel like, but I am again stuck with the feeling that I wish they would take the implied crazy of their ideas to the next level. Not as a glorified circus trick, but rather as an attempt to reach new heights. If you’re going to go prog, then prog heavily! 21 albums in, there are diminishing returns in listening to new Darkthrone albums. It has been beckoning them for quite a while already.
