La Masquerade Infernale Reviews
Review by Nick Terry / Terrorizer Magazine
This is 'only' the third Album Of The Month award we've dished out to a Norwegian band this year. No, we do not receive backhanders from the remnants of the Inner Circle. No, we do not automatically fall down and worship anything that moves in those parts. Little could be as skullcrushingly dull these days than Norse Black Metal of the old style, after all.
Rather, it's as simple (or as complex) as this: Arcturus, in common with Emperor, In The Woods, Mayhem or Solefald, have gone and stuck their necks right out, and have dared to push the envelope. Well, burst it, to be honest. 'La Masquerade Infernale' is possibly the strangest, most idiosyncratically beautiful record you will hear this year. Though you'll hear Hellhammer of Mayhem cratering his snare-drums in one of the finest displays of kit-abuse for many a moon, and you'll get the twinned vocals of Garm (he of Ulver and late of the parish of Borknagar) and Simen Hestnaes, live vocalist for Ved Buens Ende, don't, whatever you do, think Black Metal. Like the star-system they're named after, this is light years beyond that. To label this ambitious would be an understatement; to call it avantgarde would be an insult. You'll see, you'll see.
It starts with a vocoder intro eerily reminiscent of Scorn's 'Deliverance', and just as unsettling as that masterpiece of dread, then leaps headlong into a plaintive chorus so pitch-perfect, you all but want to throw the stereo out the window when they deliberately f*** it up and modulate into something quite other. Over the next forty-seven minutes, you get a string quintet ('Ad Astra'), a TripHop fade-in ('La Masquerade Infernale'), Hyperspeed Technical Death Metal (ditto), a kind of blend between fairground music and Einsturzende Neubauten rewriting Black Metal with megaphone vocals buried in a shallow sound-grave ('The Thronw Of Tragedy') and Rush-meets-Ambient-and-gets-mugged-by-Oscar Wilde-imitating-Count Dracula ('Of Nails And Sinners'). All of this febrile attempt to describe 'La Masquerade Infernale' is, it should go without saying, complete bollocks, because I could listen to the whole album again in half an hour's time and come up with a completely different set of descriptions.
There is, you'll be surprised to know, a highlight amidst the carnivalesque derangement contained herein. To recap, 'The Chaos Path' may feature Hellhammer on drums but it begins like Faith No More, before mutating in front of your eyes into something Thirties theatre composer Kurt Weill might have written had he got turned onto The Residents and Captain Beefheart. If that wasn't enough (it also features the most insidiously hypnotic vocals on the whole album), at one point, it breaks into 'Into The Pandemonium'-style Epic Opera, and then decides to finish itself off with a minute's worth of Drum & Bass!
So, yeah, it's pretty weird. Don't go thinking, though, that it isn't Metal: throughout this diaspora of sound, you'll find a solid red thread of the stuff running right down the middle, from start to finish. It's just very strange Metal, 'sall.
As eagle-eyed readers may have noticed, 'La Masquerade Infernale' was formerly entitled 'The Satanist'. It's some indication of the brain-frying lengths Arcturus have gone to that the renaming of the album seems all too apt and necessary. Here is a story (play? Tragic drama? Dante's Inferno set to music?) that may seem superficially familiar to denizens of the darker side, reworked and turned inside out, almost deliberately designed to confuse all preconceptions.
And indeed, watching people not 'get' this album is going to provide a hell of a lot of entertainment in months to come. What do I care? 'La Masquerade Infernale' rocked my world, and chances are, it may alter your own orbit round Planet Metal, too.
1997 Zev Toledano / LARM: The Fourth Reich of Reviews
If any of you are getting tired of everything sounding basically the same, your ship has come home. This is an extremely original avant garde masterpiece of dark music. I would call this a black opera sounding sometimes vampiric. First of all they chucked all the black rasps and growls, the vocals here are all clean. They vary from a low monk-ish stern voice to a plain Decoryah style clean vocal and a whole collection of other voices that play their part in this masquerade (e.g. a devilish/operatic soprano that seems to be grinning as it prances around with the music). The music consists of dramatic avant garde melodic tapestries of music that are pure genius. This is ext