Dimmu Borgir
Enthrone Darkness Triumphant

THE REVIEW

“Through me you go into the City of Woe
Through me you go into Eternal Pain
Through me you go among the Lost People
...
Abandon all hope, you who enter here”

Dante Alighieri (Comedy, Inferno, Canto III)

And if you really have decided to cross the threshold of this shadow world, if indeed the thought of what awaits does not disturb you, well, I invite you to look out the window and carefully observe the joyful world around you, because afterward, you may view it with different eyes.
But now, please, close your eyes, the light is fading...
Perfect in their pianistic purity, the notes of “Mourning Palace” unfold like the petals of a malefic flower, introducing a majestic Shagrath, who slashes through the melody with a deep, powerful growl, which quiets only to highlight a jagged keyboard passage resonating with ice, immediately killed by the overwhelming return of the voice, accompanied by a disturbing echo, a morbid spasm from hell, which intensifies subsequent embodying whispers of all demons infesting the shadow of night, on a now colder, piercing keyboard. An obsessive bass invades the melodic scheme, leading it to increase in speed, culminating in a hammering drum where the previously experimented vocal torture reappears, this time anxious, irrepressible... the track fades out without warning.
A dark, pulsing choir rises in the silence, a moment before the tortured “Spellbound (By The Devil)” explodes with its hypnotic force, where a voice made of nightmare and darkness, a scream from the inferno, pervades the senses, subjugating them to its evil power. Once again, the keyboard chills the oppressive melody with a hallucinatory interlude, prevailing over the voice that immediately shatters the complex construction to insert a raw, pulsating, crude element, embellished by prolonged growls capable of waking the dead. The song seems destined to disappear into a horrible spiral when Aarstad intervenes, extinguishing everything else with a haunting, uneasy scale, after which growl and melody gain a different, decadent hue, fading into a fading end...
As the last reverberations of this magnificent track dissolve into the air, do not think the worst has passed.
The fast, pressing, melodically violent riff that opens “In Death’s Embrace” immerses the listener into complete darkness. Shagrath alternates growl and scream in a heavy, angry yet frozen verse, as if etched in ice, evolving into an extensive, complex, excellent keyboard passage.
The second phase accelerates further. The instrumental performance is divine. Guitar and bass work in perfect symbiosis tied by an Argentine, vibrant Aarstad. The drums weave a diabolic veil around the structure. Above all Shagrath’s voice rages, sowing Death and intoning hymns of damnation, which in the final bars take the form of a distinctive, scratching scream, like a breath that extinguishes the song.
In fourth position “Relinquishment Of Spirit And Flesh” is raw, almost coarse. Violent riffs, amalgamated with a cruel voice form a furious, brutal track.
“The Night Masquerade” possesses a baroque charm. An enveloping melody transports the mind into a theater of horror masks, whose curtain is blood-red, and everything is sucked into a never-ending vortex of darkness, made of perversion and delirium.
A thin shroud of anguish drapes “Entrance,” where a soft keyboard and a sharp, brutal voice create anxious and dark contrasts. An excellent prelude to "Master Of Disharmony," obsessive and angry, embellished by a profound, echoing growl. The melody reduces to a subdued, unsettling background. Perfect also is “A Succubus In Rapture” where the melody is structured on a keyboard with almost epic sounds, which magnificently dictate with funeral solos and spectral voice, a scream that conjoins piercing coldness and Nordic violence.
And if you now look around you will notice hundreds of eyes staring at you from dark recesses where the light dares not tread... darkness falls faster now... Enthrone Darkness Triumphant...

“We’re forever captured by the embrace of Death!”