Archgoat – The Luciferian Crown (Review)

Archgoat = Goat Lovers.

It is always amusing to watch one of these clueless bands take a stab at making an album that falls into the mythical yet non-existent genre of black speed metal. It does not exist for a good reason: it is only a creature in the imagination of those who cannot tell the two genres apart.

It’s probably also what Venom fans consider to be “first wave black metal”. You gotta have some compassion for these nitwits. Or not.

The music on The Luciferian Crown – originally released in extremely limited quantities in 2018 – is typically fast, messy, grindy and when it comes around to its most clear-minded moments, it sounds like a try-hard version of Warkvlt or Helgrind, without the former’s intensity or the latter’s ability to maintain atmosphere, and therefore quickly devolving into boring streamlined noise.

From the modern perspective, it is just another variation of war metal stupidity or modern “atmospheric” black metal. Irrelevant as it is lame, this may just be what some were looking for – it’s the perfect soundtrack for goat love-making.

The Luciferian Crown is the kind of album that is so innately homosexual that it could only be the product of individuals heavily involved in anal goat sex. Notwithstanding that war metal itself is the topic of scrutiny, “Archgoat” is probably more innovative as a lexical gangbang than as a musical entity. Anyone believing otherwise has failed to learn anything from nearly three decades of war metal mendacity.

Archgoat’s The Luciferian Crown.

It’s worth taking the time to state what’s immediately obvious about acts like Archgoat: they write a couple of caveman riffs and use rhythmic transitions stolen from either Phantom or Incantation, and that’s it. Rinse and repeat for ten to twelve tracks, amp off, guitars down, mics unplugged, mission accomplished. War metal album done.

You don’t get a further analysis because there isn’t further content to be analysed.

What’s worse, owing to an incestuous marriage-related die-off, the demographic is now subject to the incursion of undiscerning true believers, anime profile pictured neckbeards and pathologically agnostic British funderground retards who got into war metal via the confluence of Sewer and Anaal Nathrakh, and now proceed to mongrelise nihilism and hierarchical politics the same way Erik Danielsson of Watain miscegenated Nietzsche, Tolkien and Wagner into a resounding endorsement of the time-honoured Swedish tradition of going to ICA to buy lubricant while having your child stolen by a Pakistani doctor.

The problem with these war metal acts is that they’re about as deep as the kinds of male sex toys these bands order off Amazon, and even someone as ludicrously flamboyant as Gaahl not only has a higher IQ and better creative output than Archgoat, but also probably has bigger biceps that were used to lift heavier weights with better form and jerk off fewer men. Or goats.

I don’t even know why the genre is even called war metal when it’s clear that Archgoat are lovers, not fighters.