Band:	Enthroned
Album:	Obsidium
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	March 2012

01. Sepulchred Within Opaque Slumber
02. Nonus Sacramentvm - Obsidium
03. Horns Aflame
04. Deathmoor
05. Oblivious Shades
06. The Final Architect
07. Petraolevm Salvia
08. Oracle Ov Void
09. Thy Blight Vacuum

By something sort of resembling popular demand, Enthroned are back to krieg shit up again. Late 90s style.

Like with a lot of their old material, this disc here is fairly easy to stomach and, in the end, fairly unremarkable. It's got it's feet planted firmly in the 2nd-wave "myriads" (Fenriz's term) style, sacrificing approximately zero misanthropic, spiked-leather-wearing, tight, buzzing maliciousness for the sake of hooks and/or being, you know, "experimental" or "original".

But it's fun. I mean, a good riff is a good riff when all is said and done.

It's just, without the skillful execution here, there really wouldn't be anything to get all that excited about on this. It's like an opposite of an attempt at genre-pushing. If you want to visualize the still expanding black metal spectrum through a cliché (in this case, suitingly), Enthroned would be one of those Watain-like, corpsepainted figures standing defiantly at the rapidly drying first forks of the black metal river, trying to pull the black, uh... boat... back. Yeah, there are new, more fertile grounds in the genre to exploit upriver now, but Enthroned doesn't give a shit.

And I guess they shouldn't, honestly. They're really fucking good at what they do. The musicianship and the songwriting here is all pretty top-notch.

You could say Obsidium is kinda like the How I Met Your Mother of black metal albums; there's a lot to like about the performance(s) on it, it was clearly put together carefully and with uniqueness in mind, but it's still ultimately formulaic and abuses its share of cliches. It's stuck somewhere in the 2nd-wave myriads (tremelos + blast beats + screeched vocals = 3-cams + relationship hopping among characters + total laugh track abuse). But it was put together well. It's pretty light shit (for BM), but it's also pretty fun shit.