Belus was good for me, but after that I started to lose attention. Latest one I didn't bother to buy. Heard it couple of times, but just something is missing. The big charm of Burzum has been the sound quality itself, what has enhanced memorable and mind-capturing riffs. It has never been "perfect" in terms of production values, yet from this imperfection was found the ultimate spirit of band. With Belus, was started this relatively clean and standard production. It is not that "professional" really, just dry, clean, and soulless. I just wrote about same thing as in Cut Hands topic about that and Whitehouse. In same way all there "comeback" albums of Burzum sound pretty much the same. It doesn't matter songs have diversity in riffs and composition, when overall album sound is pretty much identical album after album. When the early albums had very distinctive sound you could recognize album by hearing pretty much 10 seconds of it.
This is the plague of modern music, where suddenly "professional drum sound" is almost the same for all pop-culture related music. It may be euro-dance, it may be rock, it may be metal, it may be whatever. And guitar sound in most of metal appears to be this heavily compressed, in-your-face, just similar to the triggered/compressed/gated/maximized drums. When all the natural elements of space, physical loudness, variation of technology (microphones, various recorders from reel-to-reel, analogue tape, A-dat, whatever..) etc is stripped down to same faggy pro-tools, with same plug-ins, same ideology of "maximumum volume is best"... We end up in situation where Elvis LP's sound dark and fierce compared to latest Burzum or Cut Hands who's production values are actually not far from chart-music! It is somehow alarming, and I would guess that at some point when we look back at 2000's music, it will result the same grins of disgust as now looking the late 90's underground album covers (say: after photoshop/computer design was popularized and in reach of every regular joe), HAHA.
I certainly look back at my most horrid photoshop effect plagued designs and wonder what the fuck happened!? When craftmanship & personal talent was replaced by standard programming cheese.
Anyways, been rotating multiple times:
DIETER MUH "Heterodoxie" LP
Looks great, sounds great. I'm particularly enjoying the B-side, where loops aren't in such a dominant role, where repetition of very distinctive loop starts to take all attention from overall density of composition. On b-side it's more "ambient", more subtle in level of energy, but that is replaced by perhaps better flow and better blend of these elements. Especially "Helescum", in all its simplicity is highly captivating piece! Very much recommended!
