“triumphator”
Triumphator
Wings of Antichrist
Necropolis
At the onset of the new millennium, the over-saturated black metal scene had already reached critical mass, something probably unfathomable at the beginning of 1992, the year disgruntled death metal kids got their shit together and churned out something far more compelling. Nowhere is this fact more apt than on Triumphator’s debut full-length, Wings of Antichrist , a record (thanklessly) guaranteed to garner critical acclaim in underground circles where cult status-feeding-ignorance reigns supreme. A totally faceless bunch, Triumphator plunder nearly every element, to less-than-stellar effect, of fellow Swedish contemporaries Immortal and Marduk; not necessarily a frowned-upon move (the referencing, that is), but the group wholly lacks the mindfuck riffing of the former or the uber-malevolence-set-to-ridiculously-fast-speeds of the latter.
Sure, Wings of Antichrist ‘s black-metal walls may have cracks where glimmers of hope – the killer (but cliché) melodies of “Conquered Light,” the tortured doom-constipation of “Crushed Revelation” (still, a thinly-veiled rip-off of Abrumptum) – peek out, but those walls also stand on a weak foundation: purposeless buzzsawing at over bpm, where, in this case, neither dynamics nor ambiance (co-)exist. But after all is thrashed and done, only black-metal neophytes could find any worth in Wings of Antichrist – a rather unfortunate occurrence, methinks, considering the usually indefensible Necropolis recently released the stellar Babylon Whores sophomore album and, long ago, Beherit’s “Messe Des Morts” 7”, arguably the sickest, scariest “music” ever committed to plastic.
Necropolis, P.O. Box 14815, Fremont, CA 94539-4815; http://www.necropolisrec.com
