Rating: 5.5

Country: Sweden

Release Date: 2007

Record Label: Pulverised Records

Track list:
1.   The First Key   
2.   Sanguine Craving
3.   Förkastelse Av Jesu Tro   
4.   My Darkest Hate   
5.   Diaboli Iubeo   
6.   Para Vindicta 
7.   Open The Gates
8.   Death Upon Death
9.   En Mardröm, En Strid, Ett Helvete  
10.   Prince Mephisto   
11.   A New Satanic Era

Total playing time   45:00

Band Website: Vanmakt

Vanmakt - Vredskapta Mörkersagor

Gorgoth - Vocals 
Vladr - Bass
Aamoth - Guitars
Gráal - Drums

As a snobby metal elitist, recognizing Dark Funeral influences is sort of like seeing nothing but phalluses in an ink blot test; it's not really something to shout about. Yet, with their imperially melodic, blast-happy black metal and grandiloquent lyrics about the "new era of Satan," I'd be lying if I said I recognized anything else while hearing Vanmakt, therefore whether or not you'll enjoy this is totally dependent on your opinion of Dark Funeral. So if you've ever capitalized the first three letters of "Funeral" while typing their band name in some sort of attempt at mocking them, this is not for you. I, for one, am not too keen on the band. In form, they're not absurdly bad by any means, but they're ultimately responsible for a lot of conceptually childish, overproduced, homogeneous rubbish that makes no effort to genuinely move or challenge the listener. In other words, it's no wonder they're so popular. Still, I feel that Vanmakt are notable in that it seems like they, at times, try to out-Dark Funeral Dark Funeral, as if saying "haw haw, our new era of Satan is better than yours." On some levels they succeed, but they also fall into the same norsecore pitfall: diluting what should be rather rudimentary music with tedious blastbeat abuse, thus producing a series of very "samey" songs.

By now you should expect lots of distinctly Swedish harmonization, horribly triggered blastbeats (it sounds like a machine gun), and barking about Satan. The vocal performance waddles back and forth from comical to genuinely affecting, mostly consisting of the sort of geriatric hacking exhibited by -- surprise -- recent Dark Funeral's whose-his-face, with the occasional use of unsettling baritone clean vocals. Did I mention the triggers are really annoying? Because they are. So yeah, it's no doubt an intensive, hellish affair, but the buoyant energy of the songs' pseudo-anti-Christian (I'll explain the "pseudo" in a minute) venom is sometimes blackmailed by the depressing sparseness of the riffs, daring not to venture beyond the Swedish kingdom of static tremolochugblast Dark Funeral patterns and melancholic Dissection/Naglfar dual lead harmonies. It's a formula that works well in the album's shorter songs, but is revealed as the superficially pleasant product of cut & paste songwriting upon thorough exposure, which, unfortunately, Vredskapta Mörkersagor's obese playing time more than offers. It's kind of like being invited to a buffet thrown by some friends, only to realize they're on some weird new-age diet and can only serve figs or some shit.

Such blemishes aside, the songwriting is, at the very least, competent, and at its compositional apex I often find myself wondering "why isn't the rest of the album this good?" The potent counterpoint squirming around in the song "En Mardröm, En Strid, Ett Helvete," for example, is just what the riffing needed to break out of bombastic stupidity and into the majesty for which it set out to achieve. Despite being one of the more concise songs on the album, the most thought was clearly invested into the process of writing it. More like this. 

Satanic posturing has always been the barrier dividing myself and the comfort of "metalhead" identification. I don't care if you dress up your Jewish superstition in the clothing of Jesus, Lucifer, or an invisible pedophile; if you think we're more than electrified meat, you're a mouthbreather. However, despite my antipathy for religious themes, part of me shudders to think of what Vanmakt would write about without the crutch of Satanic imagery. Consider, for example, the video for the song "My Darkest Hate," a seemingly thematically unrelated horror in which a disillusioned young man externalizes his angst by histrionically applying eyeliner. That's it. It's a video about the emotional catharsis of women's makeup. There may have been a lost love interest involved too -- I don't know, I'd rather not endure it again. At least the song's fairly solid, albeit a bewildering go-nowhere, utterly-bereft-of-compelling-hooks sort of solid.

I feel as though my tone has been overwhelmingly negative thus far; I would like the reader to construe that as a reflection of my own habitual stroppiness rather than the quality of this album, as -- flaws aside -- it is quite competent as far as this sort of black metal goes, and even impressively dynastic in scope at times. My fundamental gripe is that a little goes a long way; if you were to omit every moment of compositional idleness on Vredskapta Mörkersagor, you'd be left with a mere EP's worth of music. To the band, I offer this advice: cut all the fat off your future material, and don't trigger your drums so hideously. As it stands, among its shower of tedium, Vredskapta Mörkersagor does possess a wealth of contrapuntal detail, therefore is apprehensively recommended exclusively to fans of streamlined Swedish black metal like Setherial, Marduk, Naglfar, Mörk Gryning, and obviously Dark Funeral. At any rate, Vanmakt have enough shades of potential that I managed to resist making a snarky comment about how their band name is Swedish for "powerlessness."

May 15th, 2008