It’s official: Spinal Tapdance is bringing down the Decision Hammer (patent pending) on an entire (and entirely overstuffed) genre to declare The Best Song In All Of Black Metal.
Play it loud and bang your goddamn head:
Darkthrone, “In The Shadow Of The Horns” (from A Blaze in the Northern Sky, 1992)
Perhaps you’ve got a different notion in your cobweb-addled brain as to what the Best Song In All Of Black Metal might be, but I submit to you the following: You are incorrect. Mssrs Culto and Fenriz politely request that you sit on a crocodile.
I am willing to entertain the suggestion that there are objectively “better” songs out there, meaning more elegantly composed, aesthetically pure, rifftacularly creative, grimly atmospheric, and so forth. Fine. But frankly, none of your favored bullshit can hold a Transilvanian Hunger-candelabra to the maniacal dedication of this steamroller of a song.
The lineage is easily traceable, from Venom’s first two albums to Celtic Frost’s early work to Bathory’s genre-instantiating Under the Sign of the Black Mark to this, Darkthrone’s first black metal record. But that’s just the thing: this one song, this seven minutes of cackling, unhinged black glory, is essentially the intensification – if not perfection – of all that made Venom, Celtic Frost, and Bathory great.
This tune spreads its hungering maw wide, blood-flecked spittle pooling around the wreckage of lesser ghosts; it leers and lurches and lunges and whispers, “Come in and welcome your doom.”
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Sure, there are other contenders from the vast Norse pantheon:
(Or, from the Swedish master himself…)
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Fantastic songs, all. But gimme Fenriz’s relentless death-stomp of a tempo on “In The Shadow Of The Horns” any fucking day of the week. Seriously. And have Nocturno Culto’s vocals honestly ever been as full-throttle and ear-wreckingly hideous as towards the end of this song?
Black metal has ventured down myriad shoots and branches of this first rotted tree in subsequent years, but I’ve yet to hear a tune as corrosively brilliant as this, the Best Song In All Of Black Metal.
Hahahaha…yeah, can’t really disagree. That song fucking kills…one of my favorite bands.
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Excellent choice sir. For me, it would between this and Burzum’s “Det Som Engang Var”. The great thing about “In the Shadow of the Horns” is that in addition to being grim and evil as hell, it flat out rocks! Not many black metal songs can say that.
@ Josh – Yeah, exactly. It’s like, since this has been a song since 1992, why is ‘black and roll’ even a thing? I have also always loved how they basically took a page straight out of 1980s hip-hop, with Fenriz welcoming Culto to the microphone. Classic stuff.
[…] If you’re still with us, mazel tov! Special thanks to Josh for being such a good sport throughout this long-winded back and forth. If you still haven’t had your fill of Liturgy-related jaw-flapping, my colleagues Jordan Campbell and Jim Brandon did a head-to-head review of Aesthetica over at MetalReview a few weeks ago. In case you’re in need of a refreshing black punch in the jaw, why don’t we close out the proceedings with what I (not so humbly) determined a while back to be the Greatest Song In All Of Black Metal: […]