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Emperor: Prometheus - the discipline of fire & demise

27/09/12 || Smalley

Although I may have very recently claimed to like every Emperor record a lot, a dig through my music collection to find something to review lead me to their oh-so pretentiously-titled final record, “Prometheus – the discipline of fire & (dismal) demise”, and to the new realization that I really don’t… like it that much. Not that I dislike it at all, but overall, compared to eclipse, Anthems, or Equilibrium, “Prometheus” definitely falls short of their established standard.

In retrospect though, the writing had been on the walls for “Prometheus” to underwhelm; Ihsahn had been gettin’ gothy with his hot wife in Peccatum for 2 (lame) releases already, and Samoth and Trym were gravitating away from Emp and towards their Zyklon project instead (they had already recorded their debut with that act), which is why when it came to the songwriting here, they went completely hands-off, and just played whatever the hell Ihsahn came up with.

And that seems to be the root problem with this album; while Ihsahn’s a tremendously talented fellow, it would still be quite some time after “Prometheus” (get it??) before he’d be writing truly consistent music on his own, and I imagine the influence from Peccatum didn’t help things either, so what we’re left with is a record with a few bad-ass riffs and some nice symphonic sounds, as we’ve come to expect from Emp, but also songwriting that overall, just doesn’t have the same edge & flow that the band had fine-tuned so well over the course of their previous albums.

Some bands work out fine with one mastermind dictating to the rest of the line-up (Death, anyone?), but Emperor apparently wasn’t one of those, and with the loss of the other members’ songwriting inputs, and with no dissenting voice to hold back Ihsahn’s more “artsy” urges, the band’s formula was out of whack. But, when I wrote about a lack of “edge” here, I wasn’t complaining about Emperor’s shift in sound away from pure symphonic black metal, towards a more general “extreme symphonic” style, as well as a cleaner production; after all, “Equilibrium” was the record that started that shift in the first place (before Ihsahn had taken over), and I love that!

That is, love because the heavier sections on it still felt bad-ass in a natural, organic way, whereas a lot of the heavy stuff here sounds rather forced and half-hearted, as if the majority of Ihsahn’s interest was in the artsy, symphonic flourishes instead. Some of the hard shit here does work, but not often enough to satisfy, and the symphonic portions aren’t enough to make up for that, since that isn’t as good as Emp used to do either. They’re just too light and campy, and clash tonally with the rest of the instruments; the faux-harpsichord section on “The eruption” lacks the self-aware, self-parodying nature of something like the tea ‘n crumpets acoustic work on “Fight fire with fire”, but rather, sounds completely serious, without a shred of irony.

I know Emperor’s always been a classier-sounding sort of metal, but they used to know how to actually balance the symphonics and teh metal properly, and the faux-harpsichord I imagine Ihsahn intended to sound ominous just ends up stupid. It’s hardly the only melodic sticking point here either, and though some of the classier sections work (those trumpets on “In the wordless chamber”!!!), there’s still plenty of disappointment to be had. Ihsahn, it’s okay to want to write classical music, just don’t try to slam it alongside metal in an attempt to have your cake and eat to. If you can’t make ‘em work together, just pick one and stick with it.

And as for the reduced amount of song flow here, there’s plenty of clunky riffs and an unwelcome sense of cut-and-paste; songs that would’ve intuitively ebbed-and-flowed on a previous record now just lurch and stumble from one part to the next. Some of the individual parts do sound good on their own, and have that old, uniquely-Emperor personality to ‘em (always welcome), but when taken as part of the larger whole, a desired sense of momentum just isn’t achieved. “The prophet” and “The tongue of fire” make the heavy and the melodic elements work together for the most part, and as I wrote beforehand, there are some cool individual sections buried within the other tunes, but the consistent inconsistency here is still maddening.

So, similar to the figure in the album title, Emperor helped bring down the fire of symphonic black metal to the world, but by the time they got to “Prometheus” itself, their own inner flame was beginning to flicker out. I like ‘em in general a lot, this does has some of that old-style feel about it, and I still enjoy a few tracks here (despite their flaws), which is why I just can’t give this a completely average score, but me digging this band so much is also the reason why I’m so let down with “fire”, and why it doesn’t get a “high” score of 6.5 or whatever. This isn’t the worst way to close out a career, but it’s nowhere near the best either. Oh well, at least they knew when to go their separate ways, we did get solo Ihsahn and Zyklon out of the deal (who ended their career with a more satisfactory album), and 3 out of 4 ain’t a bad track record at all, after all. Thanks for the memories, Emperor!

Information
Released: 2001
Label: Candlelight
Website: www.emperorhorde.com
Band
Ihsahn: vocals, guitars, bass, keyboards, programming
Samoth: guitars (additional)
Trym Torson: percussion

Tracklist
01. The Eruption
02. Depraved
03. Empty
04. The Prophet
05. The Tongue Of Fire
06. In The Wordless Chamber
07. Grey
08. He Who Sought The Fire
09. Thorns on My Grave

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