Dimmu Borgir - Eonian

Almost a decade after their unlikely success after the departure of iconic bassist and vocalist ICS Vortex, with Abrahadabra, Dimmu Borgir have returned with a shakey expansion on the more orchestrally intense direction Abrahadabra took with their already super symphonic sound. It isn’t all misses thankfully; Dimmu Borgir show their experience in the highest echelons of symphonic black metal on a number of songs here. Yet for all its grandeur on paper, the band struggle to dust off their gears compositionally, and there is little about the album’s melodies to support its massive sound and to bring home that familiar feeling of blackened glory in practice.

“The Unveiling” begins the album on a fitting introductory note for a band returning from eight years of creative silence with storming black metal tremolo picking and a glorious choir backing. Yet about halfway through, its bland string-and-choir section foreshadows a facet of the album’s tragic flaw: overindulgence in the neo-classical to the detriment of the album’s overall cohesive atmosphere.

“Interdimensional Sumit” starts off similarly gnarly and well-endowed by the orchestral backing it introduces with, but stumbles halfway through by the same choral pitfall that the introductory track did.

“Aetheric” follows with some very distinctly Dimmu Borgir riffing, but the unusually Swedish melodic guitar lead stringing through the middle becomes the song’s resilient backbone helping it stand out enough from the rest of the crop. The song also ends up using the choral and symphonic backing applied to it in a more black-metal-complimenting manner compared to the other tracks on the album.

The tom-heavy and tremolo-picked intro of “Council of Wolves and Snakes” gives way tastefully creepily to a more subtly dark, ritualistic vibe, further expounded upon by the subsequent acoustic and double-bass-filled sections. The choir part that comes in later feels less jarring given the song’s ritualistic atmosphere compared to most of the other songs on the album. For the most part, though, the song serves as a nice enough “culty” break from the rest of the album’s symphonic saturation.

With its rapid-fire riffing and more accenting use of choir vocals and orchestral horns to support Shagrath, both “The Empyrian Phoenix” (one of the more melodically intentional and memorable highlights on the album) and “Lightbringer” sound like something that might have wound up on Abrahadabra. I’d say the latter crumbles a bit more by its midpoint under the weight of the overused choral vocals, but for the most part it’s pretty true to what Dimmu Borgir have been striving toward for the latter part of their career.

“I Am Sovereign” drags on especially tediously with perhaps the most painstaking misuse of the choir the band hired. While its movement from section to section is clearly meant to give the impression of some kind of progressive compositional procedure, it comes off more wandering than anything.

“Archaic Correspondence” becomes the first song to make bold and epic use of the choirs at center stage with the double-bass-backed refrain they sing: “Life is a trial,and the passage is death”. The “Dunkelheit”-esque melodic percussion (I think, maybe just keys) fits in nicely to the calmer moments on the song as well.

The opening string section on “Alpha Aeon Omega” leads into a gorgeous blast-beat section that I wish was expanded upon a little better, but the song dips into by-the-cookbook Dimmu Borgir for its verses. It’s not bad, and the enticing string motif returns in the chorus, but the super classical choir shows up again and kills the vibe about halfway though, once again.

The inconsequential instrumental closer, “Rite of Passage”, does little to add to the album at its ending moments, simply summarizing the neo-classical metal musicality the songs before it have taking, distilling away all the black metal that had kept the music dynamic until this point.

While upping the neo-classical aspects of their symphonic approach to black metal (or perhaps moreso their blackened approach to symphonic metal), Dimmu Borgir somehow leave behind much of the black metal energy and drive for grandeur that made them such a strong force in Scandinavian black metal. Even though wielding massive orchestral arrangements has always been Dimmu Borgir’s greatest strength, they seem uncharacteristically rusty with them here. The band seem slow to build any kind of cohesive atmosphere across the album, and though the oversaturation of strings and choirs becomes a frequent obstacle to the cohesiveness of that mood, the band’s one-trick-pony writing and their use of the orchestra and choir as a compositional crutch is what keeps Eonianfrom being the grand return to the creative stage it needed to be for them.