Behemoth - I Loved You at Your Darkest

Well, it took long enough and came with a lot of hurdles, but I’m finally writing about Behemoth’s highly anticipated follow-up to The Satanist, an album I and a large part of the metal sphere have lauded as a triumphant and elevating return for the band after Nergal’s bout with leukemia. And it really is a massive improvement on a sound they had been consistently improving over the course of their entire career, and for that reason I and everyone who loved The Satanistwere of course very eager to hear what Behemoth would do next. I can’t blame Nergal for his hesitation earlier last year about continuing with Behemoth, knowing how much he had to live up to now, and honestly, I would have been okay with The Satanist being the last chapter in the band’s story. It’s a beautiful, intricate, deeply cathartic, and conclusive body of work that leaves me so fulfilled every time I listen to it. It’s the kind of album that by the time the climax of “O Father O Satan O Sun!” finishes, I’m left just savoring the silence of the post-experience high, not immediately reaching for another piece of music to listen to. It really is a masterpiece, and as much as Behemoth has consistently grown in their approach to blackened death metal and carved out their own dominant identity synonymous with the genre, I Loved You at Your Darkest was never going to surpass The Satanist. The most I could realistically hope for amid Nergal’s own indecisiveness about where to go with the music on Behemoth’s next project was something worthy of living in The Satanist’s shadow after all the hype died down.

I Loved You at Your Darkest was, nevertheless, easily one of the most anticipated releases for me this year, and because of that I definitely wanted to sit with it for a while and let it resonate with me at whatever frequency was best. I didn’t want to just write my early impressions of the album and my reaction to my own anticipation. I also sat with this album for awhile because a good few songs on its predecessor were growers for me as well. During the first week or so after the album’s release, I saw a lot of people praising the album immediately and saying it was even better that the Satanist, which even my first impression didn’t agree with. But as the hype died down, zealous fans slowly seemed to come to accept I Loved You at Your Darkest as something not quite on the same level as The Satanist, which is kind of where I stayed all the way up until writing this piece. Strangely, the impression I’m left with is my first impression of this album. It’s a satisfactory follow-up, and not much more, which is unfortunate because I was kind of hoping that Behemoth could easily surpass my conservative expectations. It’s still representative of the huge growth the band made with The Satanist, but musically the uncertainty of direction on this album is what sticks out like a sore thumb.

Nergal had strongly stated that he definitely did not want to simply milk The Satanist with an identical follow-up and that he wanted Behemoth to continue to progress, but he was just so conflicted about how to do so. Well, that aspect of the album definitely shows, but so does the irony of it. In many ways, I Loved You at Your Darkest does rehash a lot of ideas from The Satanist (not in a bad way by any means), but the band’s attempts to define the album as something dramatically different and separate come across as desperate and sometimes clumsy. The first bit of hype I heard about the album was the incorporation of all these new musical elements that were going to spice it up and make it a wild stylistic ride, and the thing Nergal kept bringing up was the children’s choir, which shows up on the intro track and the lead single “God = Dog”. I could have seen the children’s choir really emphasizing the humanism of the lyrics’ Satanic theology and being a really chilling presence at the forefront of a few passages. However, the mere chant they ritualistically recite makes them feel so underutilized and even out of place on the otherwise melodically well-supplemented song. There’s also the melodic clean singing (which also sounds a bit like an invocation) on the song “Bartzabel”, which again just feels like something Nergal thought to just throw atop the mix of spiritual blackened death metal for the sake of differentiating it from The Satanist, even though The Satanist also had a melodic vocal section on its closing track that was much more invigorating. In fact, a lot of songs incorporate these short choral mantras to enhance the songs’ liturgical nature (especially on the song “Sabbath Mater”), but they are often thrown in so sporadically and without proper support that they just end up distracting from the whirl of sacrilegious death metal surrounding them.

As clear as it is that Behemoth couldn’t really find a sure way to move on from The Satanist, that’s hardly a bad album to have spillover from. In fact, most of this album does feel like a sequel to The Satanist, and it’s when Behemoth don’t try to force their way out of a style or process that they have perfected when this album is at its best. The best execution of this tried-and-true style comes on the patient and spiritual “Havohej Pantocrater”, which builds over the course of heavy tom drumming, acoustic guitar leads, and choral clean vocals into a massive solo-driven bridge and a deservedly theatrical outro. As far as most of the writing on here goes, though, it really is like runoff from The Satanist, with knock-off musical ideas that capture the identifying features of that album, but much less of its charisma and potency.

There are plenty of times when the band does move away from that sound or go back a little bit to their more direct blackened death approach, and it does provide the album with some much needed diversity. The album’s second song, “Wolves ov Siberia” nicely blends the relentless black metal tremolo picking and blast beat ferocity of Evangelion with a grand ode to freedom that characterized The Satanist. The extended instrumental outro of “If Crucifixion Was Not Enough” and the ripping blast beats of “Angelvs XIII” also hearken back to Evangelion. The simple, slower, punchy beat of “Rom 5:8″ is a nice change of pace for the album too. But for the most part, I Loved You at Your Darkest really is just the afterthoughts of The Satanist trying to dress themselves as something completely different.

The next major problem with this album lies not with he style, but with the more formulaic writing. It’s not formulaic the way Nickelback’s music is formulaic, but so many songs seem to work in so many of the same ingredients from The Satanist’s cabinet in the same order across their run times, which renders the band’s attempts to mask it with clean choral vocals and children’s choirs come across as almost gimmicky. The somewhat homogeneously liturgical nature of these songs makes me thirst greatly for the likes of a guitar anthem like “Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer” or “Chant for Eschaton”, a gritty riff-based banger like “Conquer All”, or a cinematic epic like “Lucifer” or “The Satanist”. This is honestly one of the flattest albums in the band’s catalog; there’s just so little substantial deviation from the norm

I know a lot if this sounds really harsh for an album I actually really like, but I do feel like this album rides The Satanist’s coattails more than it would like to admit, and by being so similar (with only superficial differences) to such an album in aesthetic and style, it’s hard not to point to how much better the band accomplished this kind of album four years ago. Again, an album like The Satanist isn’t a bad thing at all to have residual inspiration and ideas from permeating a new Behemoth album, and I had my expectations set pretty reasonably, evidently, for I Loved You at Your Darkest. I am both satisfied with this album and disappointed that I’m only just satisfied with it. I think Behemoth have the ability to continue to make compelling music even after they’ve clearly peaked, and I think they could still take all the progress they’ve made and the lessons they’ve learned and channel that through the most honest version of themselves, because that’s what bugs me about this album. It’s trying so hard to not be its predecessor, but it was clearly unavoidable, and the few new elements the band threw didn’t cover it up. Again, this album is still rife with ethereal blackened death metal arrangements, scriptural lyricism, and so much of what Behemoth’s sound has culminated to. There is still so much of what Behemoth have made themselves famous for here on this album; it just seems like they were trying to do so much that wasn’t them just for the sake of not coming across as lazy by repeating The Satanist. But honestly, if they could manage to match The Satanist with something of similar style, it would be anything but lazy. If anything, the flavorless coloring added to the diluted runoff that pours into this album is what comes across as lazy. I’m not saying the whole project is lazy, but it’s clear that the band were just stumped at the question of how to progress past The Satanist. And instead of patiently pushing through an understandably thick creative barrier, they opted to just toss a few novel musical elements atop their current sound and call it solved. Behemoth’s conflicted and stalled creative process is what taints I Loved You at Your Darkest, and I just hope they don’t overthink their next album (if there is a next album) the way they overthought what they wanted this album to be in the context of their discography. The more religious aesthetic of the album could potentially be seen as reflective of the going through the motions by the band in their inability to come up with answers to their self-imposed questions, and I’d be happy to see the raw, unfiltered enthusiasm of Demigod or Zos Kia Cultos (Here and Beyond) in the more refined and dynamic form of The Satanist and Evangelion in the future.

I’ll end this on a good note, because, again, I do still think this is a pretty good album. For what is the product of the clearly stressful post-masterpiece crisis for this band, I Loved You at Your Darkest still manages to channel a lot of energetic performances and layered arrangements in a manner that proves that The Satanist was not a fluke and that the band can still do great things. And I still look forward to a hopefully bright future for Behemoth.