Style: Industrial black metal
Primary Emotions/Themes: A clinic on how to create fast black metal that takes no prisoners
Thoughts: When the album started with an air raid siren I knew that Satyricon had changed. To this point they had been a pillar of the black metal sound of the early to mid 90's. Helping define not only the visual style of the period but also helped define how keyboards could effectively be utilized within a genre that would otherwise perhaps shunned them.
Rebel Extravaganza drops all keyboards, all mystery, all corpse paint, and some may argue the black metal as well. I still solidly believe that this is a black metal album, the riffing and drumming and vocals all are well within the black metal realm. This is however the start of the major shift for the band, and I would argue their last truly great album.
The primary change here is the aesthetic and the atmosphere. Instead of a wholistic atmosphere that is filled out by keyboards and fast riffs, the band has instead chosen to have the guitars do all of the work for both the atmosphere and melodies (which have been greatly reduced). One thing that has not been reduced however is Frost's drumming. This album could very well be his best work from a technical stand point. These blasts are among some of the most insane yet stable I have ever heard.
Rebel Extravaganza is probably a controversial album. I tend to think that Volcano is where I start to take some issue with the band. They start losing what makes their sound their own there... though that could also be argued here... just to a lesser extent. Either way this is the last album in their discography that I own and I have no interest in exploring their discography further after this - I've tried, it's not for me.
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