CITIZINE REVIEWS

Emperor
Scattered Ashes:
A Decade Of Emperial Wrath
(Candlelight, 2003)

By Mark Prindle
www.markprindle.com

Emperor are one of the oldest and most beloved of Norway's bubblegum black metal bands who, along with fellow teen idols, Mayhem and Burzum, got all the Norwegian kids rollerskating in Viking gear and gathering together to watch churches burn through their Zany Zapers flashing light glasses in the early nineties.

In their earliest days, Emperor played the same thing Mayhem and Burzum did in their early days -- evil slices of distorted guitar arpeggiations played at breakneck speed against blastbeats (drums played at maximum speed - "THUBBATHUBBA-THUBBATHUBBA") with an evil, shrieking, croaking vocalist in pain.

As time passed by, however, like sand through an hourglass, they slowed it down, added in scary orchestras, violins and synths and things, and became what I'm told is called VIKING METAL, an ultra-serious lifestyle choice akin to goth kids but for REAL.

They don't just wear black on the outside because that's how they feel on the inside - they wear it because it's harder to see the bloodstains all over it. EEEEEEVIL! One original member of the band even killed a GAY PERSON, I think! When was the last time James Hetfield killed a gay person? (I mean, besides impaling them to death on his gargantuan peterdick.)

Emperor is broken up now. This double-CD Greatest FM Radio Hits, Rarities and Unreleased Tracks compilation shows all of today's young Black American youth what they missed: a smart, extreme, and violent band that's just as adept at creating frightening industrial-drenched modern mope-metal as they are at tearing holes in teenagers' skin with their jagged botulist riffage. Emperor were never Fakirs - this is the real shizzit!

And by "shizzit," I of course mean "fuckin moronic piece of slang used exclusively by the stupidest people in the world."

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