Style: Avant-garde black metal
Primary Emotions/Themes: What in the living nine hells is this?
Thoughts: Satanic Art is a masterclass in how to write odd ball black metal. It combined highly experimental riffs with just about anything the band could think of... and it was still black metal. They ended the album with a piano piece called wrapped in plastic. It ended a 17 minute tour de force, and left me hopeful for the future.
666 International starts out with the exact same piano piece as Satanic Art left us off with. The band starts blasting in with an insane riff and it seems like this is going to be a direct continuation of everything that Satanic Art started... then the music stops... and all hell truly does break loose.
When Shiva Interfere truly starts we have a slow drum beat with the snare drum sounding like a hammer hitting metal. The guitars are clean and have enough reverb on them to make them sound like they are in a huge cave. The vocals... are... unique. A combination of spoken word, wining, and black metal are what Aldrahn has in store for the listener. He's rambling on about whatever the hell is going on in his head and has no cadence with the music whatsoever. The keys are playing whatever the hell they want in the background in an attempt to create atmosphere.
I'm not even sure how this can be the same band that created everything that came before... even the highly experimental Satanic Art is nothing compared to this. This is one of the single strangest albums I've ever heard. It's all over the place. Sometimes it is pure black metal (Carpet Bombing), other times it's classical (Ion Storm), other times its pure insanity (Regno Potiri). I don't know if the album knows what it wants to be other than strange.
And strange is the operative term here. The band gets major points for trying something new, a lot of those points are forfeited though due to the chaos in the way that the album is structured. It never goes completely off the rails, it is still mostly musical... but man does it test the patience of the listener from time to time.
I'm not sure what the band was going for here, but damn it there is nothing else like this out there. 666 International is nothing if unique. Many other bands experimented heavily around this time in the black metal scene, but DHG may have been the king of all of that. They never quite were this insane in any of the future albums, so 666 International remains as strange today as the day it was released.
Written August 11th 2024
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