Burzum-Fallen

Full-length, Byelobog Productions
2011



"Fallen" is the eighth studio album by the one man project Burzum. Formed in 1991 by the notorious (and sole member) Varg Vikernes Burzum are elders in the field of Norwegian black metal. I'm not going to get into all of his history and my feelings on it because the story has been told many times before. If your curious why some call Varg Vikernes (aka Count Grishnach) one of the most infamous musicians of all time you can just do a quick google search and find out for yourself. On "Fallen" (the follow up to the 2010's "Belus") the word is primitive. Raw and primitive black metal. In fact musically this is similar in sound and structure to "Belus. In other words ambient and drawn out passages mixing with tradition black metal sounds. It is again very dark in feeling relying more of emotion than the actual music. By that I mean there are very simplistic metal riffs which sound like something you would hear from your local teen metal band down the road. While I will admit that it does give it a very D.I.Y. charm it is far from brilliant. The production? Well, it's not a Phil Spector wall of sound or anything. It's just...there. Actually more than anything it just sounds fairly atypical in nature. Nothing wrong with that I guess. I tend to think the appeal of Burzum at this point in time is the emotional hold the music could have on a person. "Budstikken" for example is pretty much the same guitar riff over and over so it's not like this is epic black metal by any stretch of the imagination. So my best guess would be that "Fallen" (as with the album "Belus") would appeal more to the darker side of human nature than to those seeking musical brilliance. While Burzum helped shape the early black metal scene honestly at this point I feel like people are more likely to tune in due to the notoriety of the back story. For me at least this pails in comparison to other black metal releases I've heard this year such as "The Burial Tree (II)".