Have you ever glanced over the black metal genre and looked at how it has evolved throughout the years and decided "Hey, I want to listen to a newer album that's devoid of any creativity, originality, and soul. The most boring black metal ever made."? Of course not, I haven't either. Regardless, one KFD Vordak decided that this was his artistic vision and brought Antropophobe to the world; and though he himself has insisted that this music is some sort of higher art like most wannabe black metal musicians do, make no mistake. Le Royaume des Morts somehow succeeds in being more lifeless as the pile of dead fish on the album cover.
It's pretty easy to tell that he wants to be the next Belkètre or the next Mütiilation because the music here imitates all the worst aspects of the Les Légions Noires acts. The production job sounds like ass water. Now that isn't really out of the ordinary on a lot of black metal, particularly demos, but Le Royaume des Morts isn't' supposed to be a demo. It's supposed to be a full-length album. But worse still is that the actual music on this album is so vapid that I can see it boring a school of sharks to death. It's albums like this that give black metal a bad name.
This unfortunate creation starts off with some weird droning on "Introspection" that sounds like it was taken from a Bull of Heaven piece that was shortened by about three months. About a minute and three quarters in, it cuts finally to guitar but the riff that goes on is just this block of noise with no harmony whatsoever. And it's not dissonant in a chaotic Deathspell Omega way, nor is it an eerie and unnerving Xasthur or Striborg esque passage. It's just...there to make noise. And the tone just sounds so pathetic. It's so quiet and weak sounding that when the faster "Images Drawn" comes around, the guitar just ends up getting drowned by the drums. Hell, no production job could save these pathetic riffs. They never go anywhere interesting, don't evoke any atmosphere at all, and are often times just irritating. I mean, fuck. There's these parts that are basically just droning played along to blast beats. Past the 0:52 mark of "Invasion de cafards", there's a prime example of that. Slower moments, like the huge drag that is "Cry of the Lonewolf", aren't any more inspring; hell, this same track just sounds like Burzum's "Behold the Daughters of the Firmament" in a different tuning and no keyboards.
This whole album is a collossal bore in just about every aspect. Besides the guitars, the other instruments aren't played in any inspiring pattern either. Most of the time, the drums are stuck in a basic sounding blast beat on the songs that are supposed to be more lively sounding, but "Tu parles comme une arme" does feature this really obnoxious sounding polka beat alongside guitars that for some reason sound more hushed here than the rest of the album. I've heard more epic drums in Paysage d'Hiver's programmed drums, and I have to struggle sometimes to even pick up the drum beat in some of that band's songs. KFD's black metal shrieks are weak as fuck too. Most of the album he sounds like a more constipated version of post-prison Varg Vikernes but on "Cry of the Lonewolf" he tries out constipated Sin Nanna as well. His attempts at sounding eerie on the title track by throwing in these stupid sounding distorted spoken word passages also fall way short.
Somehow, he also succeeded in making the worst black metal interlude in recent history. "(Ils arrivent)" is an obnoxious minute and a half worth of programmed percussion noise. It's very existence just confounds me. Why the fuck is this here? How the hell does this go along with the rest of the album?
Unoriginality is one thing, but taking all the worst aspects of black metal and shoving it all together into 39 minutes of fuck is another. This whole album is essentially Les Légions Noires worship for people with bad taste. Nothing creative about it at all. Now, KFD himself has expressed heavily that creating art isn't supposed to be fun and that he does in fact take his music seriously, but bad music is bad music and the only demographic that could ever appreciate this album are those pinheaded motherfuckers who go around asking for underground/unknown black metal recommendations with no other standards whatsoever. So yeah, if in his words "art = transcend suffering", go ahead and suffer through this boring fucking terribad turd of an album.
So to sum this up by asking questions and immediately answering them: is this black metal? Sure. Is this good quality black metal? No, not in a million years. And finally, is this art? I could go into MS Paint and draw two stick figures jerking each other off, and that would be more artistic than this piece of shit.
(2/100)