Burzum – Fallen

March 7, 2011 • Byelobog Productions

I was as excited for a new Burzum album as anyone. After his comeback album Belus turned out to be surprisingly pretty good, it seemed like Vikernes was more or less back in form. Alas, it was not so. Fallen shows the project starting to slide downhill and into weird territory that it shouldn't have explored.

In general, the album feels very uninspired. The riffing is pretty generic and uninteresting, sounding like a pale imitation of his earlier albums, except those were still pretty good. Here it's mostly his typical tremolo arpeggio thing, but repetitive to the point of banality. Each song has about one riff (or it seems like it) and they just go on and on, with the same thing for ten-minute-long songs. It's just wrong. The drums are no different; most of the time they sound like a drum machine programmed to play boring 4/4 double-kick or even just vanilla beats and practically nothing else. Granted he's never been a good drummer or pretended to be, so I can't fault the drums too much, but I don't think he's trying.

He is trying to branch out with the vocals, I suppose, because there is much more clean singing (it's sometimes hard to find any actual screaming vocals at all). Maybe Vikernes is getting soft in his old age, but the vocals are just plain bad. There's no emotion put into them at all, and he just sounds like he's trying to get them over with as soon as possible, so they're really tiring to listen to. The screams are still good, maybe not as good as they used to be, and I wish there were more of that.

Contrary to what I've heard from a lot of people, though, I like the production. It does sound very Burzum-y, with the raw, tinny guitars, practically no bass, and muffled drums. Supposedly, it's been "mastered ... as if it was classical music", whatever that means, and I guess it does sound pretty nice. Well, maybe not "nice" but certainly "appropriate".

Regardless, on the whole I found the album just generally uninspired and nothing new or interesting. If Varg wants to keep making these kinds of albums, that's fine with me, but he will never reach the same level of quality that his older stuff was at (not that I was even a huge fan then). There's tons of black metal similar to this I'd much rather listen to anyway, even modern stuff, so give this a miss. Burzum isn't coming back.

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