Now, Shagrath and Silenoz have dealt with major members leaving throughout their career, from Hellhammer and Nick Barker to ICS Vortex and Mustis. Now, they responded with the loss of Mustis and Vortex with the pretty by the numbers In Sorte Diaboli in 2007, but the addition of Galder seemed to stabilize the band after he found his feet on Abrahadabra and Eonian.

So how would the addition of session players in drummer Daray (ex-Vader), bassist Victor Brandt (ex-Entombed, Firespawn), keyboardist Gerlioz (ex-The Kovenant), and guitarist Damage (Chrome Division) affect the chemistry, which, based on press I’ve seen, touts Shagraz and Silinoz, doing the core writing over the last few years and  ‘getting back to their creative roots’ (there are two songs with Norwegian titles, harkening back to the band’s early albums), etc, etc.

It’s a Dimmu Borgir album. Take that as you will, based on your response to #2 in the opening paragraph. 

Like most, I feel the band’s discography up to Death Kult Armageddon is un-fuck-with-able, but, like most (I think?), everything after that seems to be treading water. And what we have here is an album that lines right up with the band’s last three albums; It’s a safe, sometimes really good, unmistakably Dimmu Borgir album.

First off, unlike Abrahadabra, where the band tried to overcompensate for something with a 100-piece orchestra/choir, the band has noticeably reigned in the choirs and symphonics, a fact Silenoz has publicly stated. But Gerlioz still delivers plenty, and they do add some bombast appropriately as needed; it’s just not utterly drenched like prior efforts, even with the Bratislava Symphony Orchestra helping out on three songs and a full choir used sparingly. Second, the band has returned to Fredrik Nordström, who produced two of the band’s classics in Death Kult Armageddon and  Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia. It sounds fantastic.

Now, song-wise, it’s similar to recent past efforts where you have a few bangers like “Born Treacherous,” “Ritualist,” “A Jewel Traced Through Coal”, and “Gateways” from Abrahadabra. Or “Alpha Aeon Omega” and “Archaic Correspondence” from Eonian. But also, like those albums, there is quite a bit of rather dull filler.

The bangers, as they tend to, hit all the Dimmu sweet spots with theatrical grandeur and veteran Norwegian black metal composition that just works; the blistering true opener “Ascent”,  the killer Abbath/ Immortal-ish stomp of “Ulvgjeld & blodsodel”, grandiose mid-paced “Repository of Divine Transmutation”, the almost pure/simple Norwegian black metal riffs of “The Exonerated” and “Recognizant”, and surprisingly melodic “Slik minnes en alkymist”. All quality Dimmu songs, but as with the last three efforts, of course, nothing is as classic/iconic as say “Mourning Palace” (still one of my top favorite songs in the genre of all time), “Kings of the Carnival Creation”, “Progenies of the Great Apocalypse”, etc, but what is, with that classic lineup?

But there are also completely forgettable, by-the-numbers tracks like “As Seen in the Unseen”, “The Qryptfarer”, “Phantom of the Nemesis”, “At the Precipice of Convergence”, “Shadows of a Thousand Perceptions”, or the wasted eight minutes for intro and outro “Trident” and “Gjǫll”. Also, the absence of an ICS Vortex, Snowy Shaw, or even an Agnete Kjølsrud means Shagrath’s mystical musings are all there is vocally. 

And because the album ends with the boring “Shadows of a Thousand Perceptions” and then “Gjǫll”, the album ends with a bit of a forgetful whimper, which tends to be where I lean on the album ultimately as a whole when I take it all in. It’s just there with the last 3 albums as Dimmu albums I don’t mind, but simply don’t come back to, unlike the band’s early efforts.

I’ve been a big fan of the band for almost twenty years now, starting with Enthrone Darkness Triumphant in 1997. The metal was cool, but the unearthly horror movie keyboards and the overwrought occultist shtick made a bigger impact on me. Some people complained that it wasn’t black metal enough, or that it was more exaggerated and cartoony than previous album Stormblast, but I dug it. It was ambitious. I could tell there was something special about the band, if only they could push their sound beyond keyboard orchestration and standard black metal imagery (and make some better costuming choices – a top hat??!)

Luckily, as the band’s sales and fame have grown, so have their budgets. Spiritual Black Dimensions had fantastic songwriting, but it still needed a production to match the band’s vision. Dimmu Borgir more than rectified that on Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia, by bringing in the Gothenburg Opera Orchestra to accompany the vicious and epic compositions. It was Dimmu Borgir‘s most impressive album yet (and still my favorite). Then Death Cult Armageddon expanded that grandiose sound with the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra (Mustis’ arrangements were a big part of that success). However, once you have an entire orchestra playing along with your snarling, shredding, riffing and roaring, what’s your follow-up? That’s right, a choir. A whole stage full of tall, attractive blond people singing their hearts out. (It also helped to fill the gap left when ICS Vortex departed, taking his gorgeous clean vocals with him.)

Now, I thought the choral elements were quite successful on Abrahadabra. The marriage of metal and orchestra were still the stars of the show, but the choir added just the right layer of rhapsodic sparkle.  Only “Dimmu Borgir,” with its Disney-fied layer of whoa-oh-whoa Pocahontas vocals, seemed to take that too far – but the rest of the song was still a complex, cacophonous wonder of ambition and aggression.

Sadly, I could not say the same for Eonian’s first single “Interdimensional Summit” when it first hit. The song has all of the same elements as Abrahadabra – metal, symphonics, and a big booming choir – but the riffs are simple and stripped down, and the choral-only chorus is so gleefully triumphant and so unabashedly cheesy that it sounds like the opening number of a black metal Broadway show. It’s like Dimmu Borgir covering Nightwish, and while I like both bands, it’s not what I was hoping to hear. I’m sure it was chosen as the first single because it’s accessible and not too threatening, but there were better choices to herald the band’s return.

In fact, I’d say everything else on Eonian (including the murky, mystical, and kooky second single “Council Of Wolves and Snakes”) is far superior, more complex, and more exciting. It’s just a great Dimmu Borgir album: imaginative, epic, and entertaining. Eight years in the making, but job well done. Of course, your mileage may vary if you just can’t stomach choirs in metal, but the band has embraced it to the fullest (and have certainly gotten their money’s worth!)

There are choral vocals on every track here – that’s the big change in Dimmu Borgir’s sound this time around – and they often take center stage in the choruses, but their melody lines are generally minor key and more malevolent-sounding. Listen to the catchy “Aetheric” or the monumental “Alpha Aeon Omega” for excellent examples of this. I’d say these two tracks, along with opening number “The Unveiling,” best exemplify Dimmu Borgir’s new vision for Eonian.

The other two new elements here are a greater use of tremolo riffs throughout the album, and a fondness for delicate piano or vibraphone-like tones. You’ll hear the tremolo right from the get-go – a wicked-sounding, serpentine, and echoey riff that erupts after a choral prelude on “The Unveiling” and plenty of places beyond that. I would have chosen that track as the first single – it builds to a similarly colossal chorus as “Interdimensional Summit,” and the second half is majestic and cinematic.

The piano/vibraphone sound is an unique and surprising choice that I’ve grown to love. You’ll hear it in the mid-section of “The Empyrean Phoenix,” the ending of “Archaic Correspondence,” and peppered throughout the thrashy “Lightbringer,” just to name a few. These ringing tones add a touch of mystique and Danny Elfman-like playfulness, but it also rises above all the bombast as a clear and ringing counterpoint. It’s also a nifty throwback to Burzum’s Filosofem and Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, which used something similar as a textural counterpoint to the ugly rawness of those albums.

If there’s one thing I can’t quite decide about Eonian, it’s whether Dimmu Borgir is now a band writing metal songs or classical compositions. The guitar and melody lines aren’t as direct as they were on Puritanical or DCA – they’re certainly present, but I wonder what these songs would sound like without all of the adornment. It seems like the next phase for Dimmu Borgir is just to go with that and write a full-on four-movement symphony. Just don’t take another eight years to do it, okay?

Very good, we actually have two weeks left now.

Where did you have the best response so far?

Actually, that was in Canada, that was actually very crazy. In the States, L.A. was pretty good.

What about touring with Enslaved?

We toured in Europe together for this tour, but that was the first time. They’re awesome guys, really crazy.

Have you followed their work over the years?

Yeah, they’ve always been in the scene in Norway, so you can’t really miss what they have been doing, you know? So we have been paying close attention to them and checking out what they’re doing. And Enslaved has also been going on for many, many years now, so it’s cool to play with an old-school band.

Cool for us, ‘cause it’s a hell of a pair-up. Anyway, let’s get into the new album. What’s the concept behind Abrahadabra?

I don’t think there’s any certain concept behind it, it’s just a very personal album for us, it’s very much about Dimmu Borgir. It’s not really a concept album, you know, we did that on the last one. But Aleister Crowley had some influence on the lyrics, and just Dimmu Borgir itself as well, where we are with the band.

I think it’s your most bombastic album yet. You were already the premier symphonic black metal band on the planet, yet you were still able to take everything and crank it up to 11. So in order to do that, what specific sounds did you guys want to integrate this time around?

We definitely wanted to make it more epic than even Death Cult Armageddon. We wanted to top that, not just with orchestration but also with choirs and also a lot of sample work. This is definitely the biggest production we’ve ever done, and there is so much going on that you will probably notice new things on the 10th time you listen to the album. We also wanted it to be very diverse – a little slow here, little fast here – so no song sounds the same. I think it’s a very varied album – each song is different from the next.

That’s one of the things I called out in my review of the album – you guys have just nailed down how to pace an album, and there’s always a lot of diversity across the entire thing.

Yeah, we’re very careful that the music has ups and downs – if it just goes in a straight line, you know, it becomes boring. The trick is to play with the music, and I think we did that on this album, to take chances, you know, change the tempo in the middle of a song. Many people just use 1-2-3-4, all the way through, but we like to change it up. For some people, that breaks the laws of physics or whatever you call it, but for Dimmu, that’s the thing that works the best.

So are you guys into classical music, do you have your musical roots in that?

We all listen to some classical music but it’s not like we sit on the tour bus and listen to Beethoven, but I think every metal guy has some roots there. Writing leads is very classically inspired as well.

Putting your brand of metal together with orchestration must be complex, so what’s that writing process like?

Well, we use a lot of keyboards and then once we have that, that’s basically an orchestra, and then so we know that will pretty much work once we do have the real thing, because it’s live. So we try to balance it out so that when we use the orchestra, the guitars slow down, and then when it’s very technical guitars, we don’t put a lot of orchestration on top of that because it would make it chaotic. We plan it very carefully, with the right riff at the right place and just working very hard at it. There’s a lot of back and forth on any given song, maybe five or ten times.

Which ones?

Oh, all of them. We make a song, and we’re not happy with it, so we change it again. In the past, when we made a song it was pretty much done, and we didn’t fool around anymore with it, but this time we were really open-minded.

Did you have more time to iterate with this album or was the pressure on anyway?

Oh yeah, but of course there was still some pressure because there were some members not part of the process anymore, they sort of disappeared at the beginning, so it just made us work harder, to prove to ourselves that we could do it.

So does that mean that Mustis handled a lot of the orchestration before?

No, we had this guy, Gaute (Storaas) that arranged the stuff for us. Shagrath would make keyboard parts for us, Mustis would as well before, so would I, so then Gaute would transfer that into the orchestra and say who would play what, add some different chords, but you know, it was always made by us, the basic ideas.

Now, in addition to the new sounds on the album, one of the biggest changes was the appearance of female vocals. What inspired that choice and how did you find Agnete Kjølsrud?

Well, we just wanted to experiment a lot, and that was just one of those ideas, like hey, let’s try to use this girl – she has this real witchy voice, you know, and we knew that when we did that, it would be this drastic step that people would react to. But it turned out to be one of the best things that we did.

And it also turned into free press for you guys – I’m sure you saw the online conspiracy theories.

Yeah, of course, all that. But she just did an amazing job, really professional – she brought a lot of multi-layers and harmonies, and we just told her what we wanted and she did it. I think she did a very, very good job.

Did you only intend to use her on the one track?

Yeah, because we had so many guest singers, so we didn’t have too much of that. We also didn’t want to have just one personality for the vocals, so that’s why we had three different people.

Snowy Shaw and Garm being the other two?

Right.

How did those come about?

Basically the same, we felt we needed to have some clean vocals since that was also something from the past. On the next album we want to fool around with the choirs even more, to have a huge choir singing more stuff, because that’s always awesome. I think we’re maybe going more for that direction. Actually live now, we have a choir doing all the clean parts, and it sounds really good, so we know that this will work in the future as well.

Wow, I’m looking forward to hearing that tonight. Okay, costumes. I love the costumes, I think they’re amazing.
G: Yeah, that was another one of those crazy ideas, just doing something new, and I think if you want to go somewhere in this business, you have to take chances, you have to go in new directions. And you know, white leather and fur, that’s still pretty metal, it’s cold, like a caveman look – we wanted to create this magical look, to do something new but still keep it metal.

I think we actually pulled it off, and that’s a thing that people might need some time to get used to, but it seems to work well live, and we feel comfortable wearing the clothes. I’m actually glad we took the chance and did something crazy.

Yeah, the black leather and the spikes was getting tired.

I’ve used those spikes for ten years, you know, so it’s good to try something different.

I think it would be great if you guys did that for every album, you know, pull a David Bowie and completely change it up again.

Yeah, you know, next album, it might be something completely different. You have to have fun when you make music, and the covers, and fool around with different ideas. As long as you stay true to the spirit of metal and the band itself.

It was totally metal, you guys looked like sorcerors. Like out of a fantasy painting.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, you know what, I didn’t know if I’d be speaking to you or not, but since you’re here, what’s going on with Old Man’s Child?

Well, right now I’m having a little break, I’m done with the contracts and figuring out what to do, but I’m a very impatient guy and my fingers are starting to itch, so you know, we’ll just see how it goes. Right now I’m just very busy with touring and stuff, so if I’m going to do another Old Man’s Child album, I need some time off to focus and put 100% into that.

Is it difficult for you to partition ideas that you have, you know, say that this is for Dimmu, or this, I really want to keep this for Old Man’s Child?

You know, I’ve tried to make Old Man’s Child a bit more guitar-oriented, a bit more thrashy. So if I had a slow riff, something more epic, I would probably use it for Dimmu, more technical and thrashy I might use it for Old Man’s, but it can vary.

Cool, looking forward to it if it happens. So I wanted to talk a bit more about the Spellemanprisens, you guys are essentially Grammy winners.

Yeah, four times.

That’s amazing, ‘cause this kind of music is not exactly mainstream in the US, but how is it in Norway you guys get that kind of recognition so often?

Well, it’s a lot better than it used to be, I mean when black metal was at its biggest, so to speak, in the 90s, you weren’t on TV and you weren’t on the radio, but now it seems that you can be on a television show and – well, actually we were on the news just before we came here, like on the morning news, you know?

In the costumes, or just dressed as you are? (Note: Galder is just kicking back in a Dimmu hoodie and black pants).

Oh no, just dressed like this. But it’s a lot more house-clean now, you know? How can it not be? It’s (black metal) the biggest musical export from Norway, so people just need to accept it for what it is and be proud of it. It also does a lot of good for Norway, gives them a good reputation when it comes to metal.

So have you guys ever taken advantage of the government support of the arts in Norway?

No, we are probably too big to get that, but I know of many other bands who get that support. Norway’s pretty good about that, if you play in a garage band, they want to help you out.

And all of the cultural furor around black metal in the early 90s, that’s pretty much gone away at this point?

Yeah, but the scene is also a little bit nicer now, you know, compared to what it used to be, you don’t have the church burnings or the murders anymore, so it’s more acceptable for the people. You know, all of our family members are very supportive now, they think it’s cool we’re doing all the concerts and stuff.

Is Norway pretty secular?

Ehh, it’s still pretty Christian.

Nominally? Or do people practice often?

Well, I think everyone is sort of Christian but it’s not like they go to church every Sunday, I think that’s very rare. But it’s generally, I would say, a very Christian country. But it’s maybe not so extreme as you have in parts of the States.

So, back to the tour, just some fluff questions for fun. You guys are on the road a lot, what are you doing to kill time?

Not really that much man, right now I mostly sit backstage playing videogames.

What are you playing?

World of Warcraft. It kills a lot of time.

Yeah, I know. You rolling Goblin or Worgen next week?

Yeah, that’s what I’m waiting for. There’s actually several people on the crew and in the band who do it too, we go on raids and stuff.

That’s hilarious. What are you?

Oh, I have a Warlock. An Orc, level 78. Trying to get him to 80.

I kinda figured Dimmu Borgir wouldn’t play Alliance.

Well, I actually did that too, I have thirteen characters.

Most of them Horde though.

Yeah, of course.

So yeah, there’s been a lot of interesting hype, rumors and changes swirling around the release of Dimmu Borgir’s ninth full-length. But all that aside, what does Abrahadabra actually sound like?

The simple answer: a Dimmu Borgir album.

That means downtuned, churning guitars, jackhammer drumming and Shagrath’s snarling, varied and expressive vocal performance, all tied together with a deafening and expensive-sounding production. And orchestration. Gobs and gobs of screaming, soaring, Wagnerian orchestration.

It’s bombastic, over-the-top and completely indulgent, and as a longtime fan, that’s exactly what I expect from these guys. Just listen to standout epics like “Born Treacherous,” “Ritualist,” the lightning-fast “A Jewel Traced Through Coal” or the increasingly-addictive lead single, “Gateways,” and tell me Dimmu Borgir aren’t still the kings of symphonic black metal (or the carnival creation, as it were).

First off, they’ve got a well-honed talent for crafting exciting, varied compositions. The palette and approach has largely been the same for the last decade, but each song uses unique hooks, vocal delivery, tempo changes and cinematic bombast to stand out from one another. I also think that by now, the band is quite skilled in ordering and structuring their albums. Death Cult Armageddon and Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia are still terrifically entertaining because of just how well-paced they are. In Sorte Diaboli may have been too samey over its running time, but I’m happy to say that Abrahadabra is a much more compelling and dynamic beast from start to finish. Ten listens in and I’m enjoying it more and more each time.

Not that some elements won’t take some getting used to. Likely every Dimmu fan will mourn the loss of ICS Vortex, but Snowy Shaw (Therion, Dream Evil) does an admirable job of filling the void, even if his style veers more towards power metal bravado (“Endings and Continuations”) or theatrical vibrato (“Ritualist,” “Renewal”) than Vortex’s Nordic magnificence. He’s a good choice though, and definitely brings something novel to the mix.

Then there are the choirs – a lot more than ever before, from the Orff-worship of “Gateways” to the title cry of “Born Treacherous” to the booming, shamanic chanting (and braying warhorns) of “The Demiurge Molecule.” The choirs are another great addition to Dimmu Borgir’s already-rich palette – but just wait you get to the album’s centerpiece, the curiously titled “Dimmu Borgir.” It opens with triumphant acapella choirs that can only be described as the Broadway production of Pocahontas, and from there, brings in operatic divas and keening strings to finally transform Dimmu Borgir into the black metal version of Nightwish. Minus the tits, of course. For some of you – especially Dimmu’s detractors, who will have a field day with this song – this may be the moment where all that pretentious pomp finally tips the whole shebang into ludicrous parody, but let me remind you: white fur and tassels. And you know, I like this track too – especially its ripping final minutes, which is just quintessential Dimmu.

So while Abrahadabra has arrived among some weird head-scratchers – like what’s Annie Lennox doing in the “Gateways” video? – Dimmu Borgir delivers once again. Both to the fans, who should enjoy this as much as Death Cult and Puritanical, and also to the Dimmu-Borgir-Aren’t-Black-Metal-Gawd-Dammit haters, who will be foaming at the mouth as they pound away on their blogs and forums.

‘Cause really, it all comes down to this: White fur and tassels. In black metal. It either works for you, or it doesn’t. And besides, spikes and armor are sooo 1997.

To date, over 101 musicians have lent their talents to the making of the album.

Composer Gaute Storaas shares some insight on what it’s like to work with DIMMU BORGIR:

“There have been several attempts of dressing up rock bands in suits, bow ties, and symphonic splendor – to various degrees of success. Working with DIMMU BORGIR is quite different. Their music is epic, thematic and symphonic already from the creation; they are clearly having an orchestral approach to composing.

My role in this is sometimes just to transcribe their themes, sometimes to take their ideas, tear them apart and build them back up in ways that are true to the band’s intentions. The music must also be both interesting and playable for the musicians, and hopefully, meet the quality standards of the orchestral world.”

DIMMU BORGIR‘s ninth studio album will be released in Germany on October 8th, in the rest of Europe on October 11th, and in North America on October 12th.

That’s the first thing I always think of when I remember that night (well, that and the trenchcoated, corpse-painted dork whining to the bouncer that he’d forgotten his ID). Even though we saw the band out of costume and out of character, it reinforced that Dimmu Borgir wasn’t just there to play a concert. They were there to put on a show – and they are terrific showmen.

Case in point, this excellent 3-disc DVD set just released in October, which has to be one of the most entertaining live compilations I’ve seen in a long time. Impressive graphics and production on the menus, two long shows – one in Oslo and one at Wacken – and a host of extras. And most importantly, it sounds fucking great.

The Oslo show on Disc 1 features a well-chosen set list from pretty much every album (excluding For All Tid). There’s a number of favorites from Enthrone Darkness Triumphant, the In Sorte stuff sounds huge, and they even threw in gems like “The Insight and the Catharsis,” off of Spiritual Black Dimensions. Not enough from Puritanical (my favorite), but “Blessings Upon the Throne of Tyranny” is here, and that’s what’s important.

Of course, “Progenies of the Great Apocalypse” is the bombastic opener, and although the synth library can’t compete with the Prague Philharmonic, it’s only an issue during that one song. For the rest of the concert, the mix and orchestration sounds great, with the guitars and double-bass battery dominating like they’re supposed to. Shagrath’s performance is spot-on (although his angry Norwegian banter with the crowd between songs sounds even scarier than his regular vocals), and many of the songs seem like they were chosen because they showcase Vortex’s amazing clean vocals. Seriously, the guy has one of the most magnificent voices in all of metal.

Visually, it’s a lurid, spectral light show of blues and greens, as if the band were playing atop the walls of Minas Morgul, and there’s a quick rhythm of varied camerawork and angles to heighten the excitement. My only complaint is that the show was filmed in a theater-type venue, where it’s clear that the crowd is confined to their seats and rows, so some of the natural chaos is removed. But that’s not the band’s problem, and the Wacken set more than makes up for that.

In fact, I enjoyed the Wacken set on Disc 2 even more than the Oslo show – perhaps because I want to make it there one day so badly. Hopefully Dimmu will be playing that year, because this is another monster performance. Perhaps it’s the size of the endless crowd of metal faithful stretching out to the horizon, or the night sky above, or the blooming explosions of firepots on the stage, but the Wacken show seemed even more epic, and the band even more ferocious. It’s much the same setlist, although it also boasts “Kings of the Carnival Creation” – yet another chance for Vortex to shine.

(Note: There is an issue with the Wacken set on Disc 2, where it initially seems to have no sound. Nuclear Blast has acknowledged that this was a manufacturing error, and is sending out replacements. In the meantime, you can use this workaround: Select the Wacken show, and then on the subscreen where you choose between Surround and Stereo, highlight your selection and then press Stop to return to your DVD player’s default screen. When you press Play again from there, the show will play with audio.)

As far as the extras go, there’s a collection of music videos (mostly taken from the last few albums – I hadn’t seen the one for “The Chosen Legacy,” which features medieval zombie wenches and lots of swordplay), an additional live performance from the P3 session in Norway, and a long, behind-the-scenes feature. That video is little more than a haphazard home movie (still interesting at times), but there’s even more entertaining tour footage you can access during the Oslo show (press your Enter button when a symbol is displayed onscreen).

As a longtime Dimmu fan, I enjoyed the hell out of this release – it makes me wish they were playing here again right now, so I could go and see them. That’s as much as you can ask from any concert video.

When the dust settles, ultimately, as simply as I can put it, In Sorte Diaboli is a Dimmu Borgir album and thusly comes with all the positives and negatives that graced the bands albums since Galder and Simen Hestæs joined the fray and made Dimmu Borgir a supergroup of sorts.

On the positive side, as expected the whole package is excellently packaged and presented, it’s lavishly produced (more on that later), it’s full of sweeping symphonics and Simen Hestæs sings. On the negative, the almost overproduction (notably the clicky drums) is almost ridiculously synthetic, there’s (again) not enough Simen Hestæs and frankly, for the first album in Dimmu Borgir’s career, there’s no real ‘great’ or album defining song. Where Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia had “Kings of Carnival Creation” and Death Cult Armageddon had the amazing “Progenies of the Great Apocalypse”, In Sorte Diaboli just has a string of solid songs. The only songs that come close to anything remotely ‘great’ either feature Hestæs delivering his trademark croon such as “The Sacrilegious Scorn” and the circus-like lurch of “The Invaluable Darkness” or see the band crank up the atmospherics a notch as in “The Fundamental Alienation” (with its admittedly cool choir use). Even the albums religiously conceptual approach doesn’t stand out.

As I said already In Sorte Diaboli is simply a Dimmu Borgir album, and as such, many of you will choose to buy it or not to buy it based on that fact alone, not this review. Still, it’s better than Cradle of Filth’s last effort, and will no doubt move a bunch of units. However, until the band further realizes Hestæs is their best asset and utilize him for more than a couple of choruses, Dimmu Borgir are beginning to be as predictable and unimaginative as their three word album titles.