Venom
Metal Black

THE REVIEW

Beautiful things have an ugly flaw: they end.

And even I, who am not an excessive admirer of black metal (apart from Ulver), must admit that albums like Welcome to Hell or Black Metal had (and still have) a certain value: that is, the ability to bring to excess the extreme tendency that was beginning to emerge at that time and which would lead to the current bifrontal extreme metal scene (although, as far as I'm concerned, Red by King Crimson took a long time to match in extremism).

However, we're talking about twenty, twenty-five years ago. And time passes. It passes even for Venom, of whose old guard only the good (?) Cronos remains. After a series of unnoticed (and a bit unnoticeable) records and a bit of a hiatus, the trio pulls this Metal Black out of their pockets.

We are not there. Either it's me, or this cd just doesn't work.

Songs that have nothing extreme (it's no coincidence that among the genres there's no "black metal"), a very modern production, just a little dirty (I need to pass some Converge albums to them...), tracks without bite, predictable and banal, with titles like Antichrist, A Good Day To Die, House of Pain, Darkest Realm. If in the early records there was that subtle jovial humor, here there is no slightest trace of it, either you are satanists or little remains of these tracks.

Cronos himself once said [paraphrasing] "playing and meeting more and more people in the scene, I realized that what was to me more than anything else a joke or fun, for many people it is instead a very serious thing, and I was shocked by it" enough to start getting serious. But there's nothing to be done. There's very little serious about this cd.

Failed.