Limbonic Art – Phantasmagoria (2010)

In their two albums after their 2006 reformation, Limbonic Art has managed to tarnish their legacy created by impressive releases such as “Moon in the Scorpio” and “In Abhorrence Dementia”. “Phantasmagoria” is one of said albums, and with this release we can only hope that the band changes their name or goes back to sleep once more.

In another attempt at creating something ‘impressive’ the ‘band’ fails miserably and creates another sub-par release from what once was from Limbonic Art. “Phantasmagoria” features well over one hour of pointless and direction-less songs that will only cause Black Metal fans to cringe track after track, since this release will give you a headache similar to the ones you get by listening to pure static for 6 hours.

The whole let’s do this as symphonic as we can approach is not enough to save bad and repetitive riffs, and ‘crushing’ drums that sound like bad computer loops. There are some decent moments here and there, but they are quickly crushed by the massive hissing from the ‘cymbals’ and the randomly arranged ‘compositions’ presented in this album. Yes, you can call this fairly brutal and massive, but not in a good way, at least for our ears.

You can still hear some of the ‘traditional’ Norwegian Black Metal elements here and there and there are some minimal sections that resemble some Emperor mixed with Mysticum, but never concise enough to initiate an appeal for this album. The vocals are pretty decent, if you could only hear them more over the crappy drum programming.

If we had to pick some decent songs in order to save our lives, we would say that “The Burning Vortex”, “Dark Winds”, and “A World in Pandemonium” can be some songs that would trick people into buying this release, because of their ‘slower’ tempo and understandable nature. Everything else in this album will directly go to limbo and be forgotten as another sub-par release from a band trying to re-live past glories.

Release: September 28th, 2010

Country: Norway