Weltbrand "Radiance Of A Thousand Suns - The Apocalyptic Triumph" CD

Track 16 Carnivore cover

Debut release of apocalyptic black metal.

There's nothing that black metal bands love more than disappointing me with a novel aesthetic wrapped around boring, stereotypical music. Case in point: this very album. Long, involved album name, lots of post-apocalyptic song titles, strange, brief electronic interludes dotting the album itself, mysterious cover art- I brace myself for High Art. Or if not high art, maybe just something neat that sounds like Sprawlcosm or V:28 or something. But once the neat and somewhat delightfully cheesy intro track passes, what do I get from the meat of the music? Utterly generic, totally uninspired Swedish-style black metal with not a hint of nuance or ambition anywhere. God damnit.
The oddness of this album is completely superficial- the imagery and electronic elements of the interludes never at any point intersect with the black metal on the record, so you're left with a bad black metal album surrounded by a bunch of aesthetic elements that apparently got switched in accidentally at the pressing plant. The black metal itself is a combination of Dissection (minus the substantial melodies,) Dark Funeral (minus the passion and vigor,) and Darkthrone (minus the personality,) which results in a black metal album that sounds like black metal but absolutely nothing else. Crippled by an overly dry production job, some impressively feeble vocals, and a total lack of compelling riffcraft, Weltbrand makes absolutely no effort to make the bulk of their music interesting, instead apparently pouring their time into the (ultimately meaningless) electronic interludes that are all over the place. Much to the band's chagrin, these end up being infinitely more entertaining to listen to than the black metal- they're cheesy and ridiculous, but fuck, at least they appear to have some personality behind them, which is something that can't be said of the phoned-in black metal. Very, very occasionally the band will bust out a melodic tremolo riff that reminds me of a super stripped-down Niden Div. 187 passage, but that's the full extent of the band's creativity. Most of the time, they're content to rehash exactly what has been done in black metal seemingly throughout the genre's history.

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