Behemoth – "Opvs Contra Natvram"

... But I did love them at their darkest

Yeah, so it's been two months; better say something about this sucker already. I've listened to it quite a few times, and maybe I've been kinda expecting it to reveal itself to me.

There's no doubt that 2014's "The Satanist" gave Behemoth their big break. – A break for which they almost seemed destined with their 15-year streak of pure solid death/black outputs sans any of those ugly roots-black appendixes that remained on 1998's "Pandemonic Incantations".

And perhaps that's exactly the proverbial thing here. Behemoth have long shed what made them cut some edge with both normies and metalheads alike, and today, they'd only be seen as edgy with the former group. Indeed, the slow tempo and many synth-layers in "The Deathless Sun" from this, their 12th studio album, remind me of this little 21-year old ditty called "Kings of the Carnival Creation" by this little extreme mainstream metal band called Dimmu Borgir.

And as much as I dug Dimmu Borgir back then for pushing boundaries, it most of all seems like Behemoth mastermind Nergal has stopped trying as hard at that as he's been doing for most of his career. Sure, you won't find many interviews where he doesn't talk about evolving creatively, but it seems his idea of creative evolution since 2018's queerly named "I Loved You at Your Darkest" can be largely reduced to churning out standard-riffs and semi-predictable cadences.

"Opvs Contra Natvram" feels like it's a very written album – written rather than channeled by that spontaneous, confident intuition which normally makes Nergal a stand-out on the global metal scene altogether.

Mind you, "Opvs Contra Natvram" definitely does have its merits. But the most solid ones are few and far between. It's metal alright, and most people would consider it extreme. For the rest of us, though, it's neither very surprising or innovative. It's not bad, it's just... I dunno, not very exciting, either.

Maybe it's me getting old and bitter. But that doesn't rule out the possibility that Behemoth are getting old and formulaic, either. (In fact, I know people who'd claim that at least one of these would be the case.)

Apart from "Malaria Vvlgata" (sic) blasting as it should, the real goodies and stand-outs are to be found on side 2 here. While "Disinheritance" does have kinduva boring intro, it proceeds to thrash towards the horizon in that grim, brutal fashion that really should be the sonic fulcrum for a band like Behemoth. The best track is the complex, chaotic grind beast "Thy Becoming Eternal".

Maybe it's me getting old and bitter. But that doesn't rule out the possibility that Behemoth are getting old and formulaic, either.

Then there's stuff like that catchy start/stop riff in "Once Upon a Pale Horse", which is a cool stand-out in itself, but not enough to carry a tune that ends up plodding rather than that cool stand-out it could've been. This is symptomatic for the impression that "Opvs Contra Natvram" feels like it's a very written album – written rather than channeled by that spontaneous, confident intuition which normally makes Nergal a stand-out on the global metal scene altogether.

In fact, the album cover this time speaks volumes of the content: It's blasphemous and anti-norm, sure; and at the same time, it's as neat and clean through-and-through as it gets within the genre. The result is an album that I wouldn't downright mind hearing again, but that I wouldn't actively revisit, either.

When rating albums by the scale of 1 through 6, you often come across this curious phenomenon of albums that are, in and by themselves, decent, but at the same time somewhat uninteresting. My friend and I call these albums 'the boring 4/6', and that's exactly what this is. In my current rating system, that constitutes a 3.5.

Rating: 3.5 out of 6

Genre: Modern black / death metal
Release date: 16/9/2022
Label: Nuclear Blast
Producer: Behemoth + Daniel Bergstrand