Satyricon – Dark Medieval Times (1993)

Okay, this one takes me back. When I first started listening to metal, I was pretty focused on seeking out albums that the internet considered to be classics. This was one of them. Satyricon is yet another one of those more or less formative Norwegian black metal bands that embraced values drift, for better or for worse. Back in the day, though, they were big on atmosphere and traditional acoustic instruments, to the point that key member Sigurd Wongraven occasionally had to channel his energy into more black metal/folk/ambient/medieval projects in order to keep from detonating like a thermonuclear bomb! …okay, maybe that’s more grim than the actual reality of things, but when it comes to the Norwegian founding fathers, exaggerated grimdark is the name of the game.

Anyways – Dark Medieval Times. For you to expect medievalish (in a cinematic sense) black metal is a testament to your reading comprehension. Satyricon wastes no time in irritating me with a compositional blunder – “Walk the Path of Sorrow” begins with an excerpt from Death in the Blue Lake by When (a prolific psychedlic pop/avant garde collage project) that admittedly nails a dank dungeon aesthetic. The problem comes when the song proper completely ignores every musical idea from before, essentially rendering the intro meaningless. Now, I’m admittedly very biased about this sort of thing (for an example of how to do intros well, see “Battery” by Metallica), but either way, it doesn’t exactly fill me with hope. Satyricon’s contributions to this album, for whatever it’s worth, have the stereotypical thin, trebly black metal production – it’s all fine and reasonably intelligible. Any complaints I could muster pale in comparison to the songwriting issues.

I should preface this all by saying that on a minute to minute basis, Dark Medieval Times doesn’t feel all that bad. Individual riffs and motifs are fine; even pleasant to listen to. I remember reading a lot of praise for this album back in the day that focused around all the acoustics on display. The problem comes when you listen to a song in its entirety. All of the musical ideas here are arranged in a haphazard fashion, with some really awkward and abrupt changes between song sections. Now, I have to give the band some credit for aggressively avoiding verse/chorus writing and instead thorough-composing everything, but these tracks needed more time in the oven. There’s two possibilities as to how the album got this way; the first is the youthful experience of an ambitious band reaching further than they knew how to, but the second is that the musicians were trying to show off how clever and progressive they could be! The latter, mind you, is an issue that afflicts my earliest metal compositions, back in 2009-2010 – I was so insistent on writing “progressive” metal that I filled my songs chock full of riffs and jarring transitions that served little purpose other than to indicate that I knew what time and key signatures were. I had to develop some humility in order to improve my songwriting!

I really don’t know enough about Satyricon to say if they ever figured this out – if Metal Archives is anything to go by, they tightened things up after a while, resulting in Nemesis Divina, and then disappeared into their own little world of black ‘n’ roll favorites. Maybe some of those albums are worth your time? Either way, this one doesn’t do it for me.

Highlights: “Dark Medieval Times”, “Skyggedans” (Satyr screams something that sounds like “TITTY MUFFIN”, which is pretty funny to my horny lesbian brain), “The Dark Castle in the Deep Forest”