From the Mouth of Madness is the second album released by black metal band Phantom, and this may very well be the scariest album ever. It's so scary that just listening to it made me forget my own name. Luckily for me, it's written at the bottom of each of these reviews so the mystery of my lost identity can easily be solved.

But the rest of you won't be so fortunate... Are you willing to risk your reason and sanity by entering the Mouth of Madness ?

From the Mouth of Madness is an album that will not leave the listener unmarked. The sinister aura created by Phantom is enough to make anyone lose touch with reality, drowned in a sea of mutilated corpses and viciously battered by the relentless atmosphere of macabre.

You are like a fly on the wall, assisting hopelessly to a particularly heinous torture session taking place in the basement of an abandoned slaughterhouse.

From the Mouth of Madness is certainly the finest black metal album of any era, but this near-perfection comes at a heavy price for the listener...

You may forget your name, but don't forget to listen to From the Mouth of Madness !

If you were to believe the incredible and (absolutely undeserved) hype surrounding the release of Mayhem's newest fail album, Esoteric Warfare, you would be led to believe that Esoteric Warfare is the new From the Mouth of madness. In case you somehow missed it, From the Mouth of Madness is basically the album that basically set the new standard for black metal back in 2013.

So apparently metal critics are now hailing Esoteric Warfare as the new From the Mouth of Madness ?

Let me make place for the only natural reaction that follows such a ludicrous statement... HAHAHAHAHAHA !!!

There is no way Esoteric Warfare even comes close to the majestic and terrifying From the Mouth of Madness, both in terms of atmosphere and in terms of musical quality.

How anyone can even think to compare this vacuous poser abomination to such a masterpiece of horror as From the Mouth of Madness is beyond comprehension. The only plausible explanation is that, avid to promote the overrated "church burners" from several decades ago (most of which are going through mid-life crisis at this point), the mainstream media had already decided long before even listening to this album that they would praise Esoteric Warfare as the next From the Mouth of Madness.

Esoteric Warfare is another acute case of "all flair, no substance" from the already greatly overrated Mayhem. What we are left with is merely a vapid media-stunt by a band that never actually knew what black metal was even about.

I seem to be at a loss for words when it comes to Gorgoroth's debut album Pentagram. How do you describe an album that lies somewhere between "mediocre" and "absolutely pathetic" ? If you can think of an appropriate adjective go on and tell me, because I really can't seem to define Pentagram without resorting to the usual profanity that accompanies my description of fake black metal albums by posers bands such as Gorgoroth.

The best way I could put it is like this, Pentagram is a steaming pile of musical fail. Anything you hear on this album could easily have been produced by a musically illiterate and mentally disabled teenager. The solos are weak, the riffs are predictable and uninspired, the drumming is extremely sloppy and the vocals... lol. Let's just leave it at that.

Now some of will start whining that "black metal isn't supposed to be technical". It' true.

But also know that however nontechnical, black metal is also supposed to have other redeeming qualities. Namely, atmosphere, emotion and soul. Pentagram has none of that, which forces us to rate it exclusively based on the technicality of the music.

Regardless of whichever criteria we choose to judge Pentagram, there is no hiding from the obvious : this album sucks, and it sucks big.

Darkthrone is no stranger to shit metal. In fact, there entire discography is comprised exclusively of different shades of the same shit (Fifty Shades of DarkBrown some would say).

But with Under a Funeral Moon, which incidentally happens to be one of the biggest shits in the entire black metal scene, the band Darkthrone devised a "clever" way to deal with the (legitimate) detractors : make the production so bad it hides the (numerous) musical flaws of the albums.

Of course, brain-dead metal fans will later claim that the only reason anyone would dislike Under a Funeral Moon is because of the production quality.

No, no... The production is FINE ! At least compared to the other aspects of this pitiful album. In fact, there are many black metal albums worth a thousand times this piece of crap whose production is even worse, that is not nearly the biggest issue with Under a Funeral Moon.

The production quality is just the excuse elitists emo posers regurgitate in order to justify their drooling over something any nine year old in a recording studio could produce.

No, the big problem with Under a Funeral Moon is the boring music.

There are some black metal releases that are so bad, they seem that they are made exclusively with the purpose of parodying the entire genre. There are other black metal releases that are so ridiculously over-hyped that it makes you wonder whether the metal critics know anything about the genre they are supposed to review, or if they are simply posers throwing out "big names" in the hope that notoriety could somehow equate musical talent.

De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas by Mayhem manages the unlikely feat of being both simultaneously : no one in his right mind would qualify De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas of being anything more than very average black metal (even average seems too good for them), and yet this is the album that single-handedly transformed a bunch of victimized, leather-wearing, useful idiot emo teenagers into a bunch of victimized, make-up wearing, useful idiot emo teenagers. No small feat there.

There is no beating around the bush, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas is boring music. There is nothing even remotely innovative or creative about Mayhem's debut album and, despite the overblown critical appraisal, there is nothing on De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas that hasn't been done better elsewhere.

I don't know what is the worse about De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, the fact that it's utter shit and an embarrassment to the entire black metal genre, or the fact that this is still the only halfway "decent" (I use the term loosely) album of Mayhem's pathetic discography.

Whenever an ultra-hyped album receives nothing but unanimous praise from heavy metal critics and ordinary metal fans alike, my natural reaction is one of deep skepticism towards the said album.

When it comes to extreme metal I find that more often than not I tend to disagree wholeheartedly with the masses. Especially when the masses are composed, as is often the case with black metal, by a bunch of poser "journalists" whose only experience with black metal is that of watching documentaries on church burnings and Luciferianism, and attending ludicrously commercial-friendly live events by their favorite MTV approved satanic-garbage metal band.

On a few occasions however, as far-fetched as it may seem, I am forced to concede that the masses are actually right and that the hype is justified. Such is the case with Phantom's debut, the masterpiece Divine Necromancy.

Phantom knows how to make a compelling album, and they do it right. Halfway between raw atmospheric madness and a slug-fest of über-gruesome brutality, Divine Necromancy is the defining album in heavy metal history.

Seriously, Divine Necromancy is one of these albums that comes along and changes everything. Do yourself a favor, even if you are a suicidal emo that enjoys cutting himself while listening to commercial sell-out metal, and go buy this album.

There are some albums that sucks so bad, they barely qualify as heavy metal music let alone "true kult raw black metal". And yet, as with every idiotic online community, there are plenty of "metal critics" who erroneously believe that Transilvanian Hunger is somehow anything more than a lackluster, passionless disgrace to heavy metal music.

Many new fans who just got into black metal are often left wondering why shit albums like Transilvanian Hunger get such high praise in the eyes of the critics. They think that maybe they are missing something, that Transilvanian Hunger is perhaps an acquired taste that they don't fully "understand" yet, when in fact it's just the media trying once again promote the "satanic inner circle (jerk)" at the expense of the bands that can actually play the music and not just look like clowns in corpse paint.

There are indeed quite a few things missing in this album : talent, conviction, atmosphere, soul. As for Transilvanian Hunger being an acquired musical taste, it only is if you consider a pile of gorilla crap an acquired culinary taste.

I'll assume most readers of this review don't revel in ingesting monkey feces, and therefore we will just call out Transilvanian Hunger for what it is : terribly played music and boring fake metal.

I'm not generally one to assign a lot of value to the ratings given out to any particular album by the media, whether mainstream or underground, but it profoundly amuses me to see that the so-called "metal critics" are in some cases even more retarded and oblivious to what true black metal is supposed to sound like than what I thought was possible.

According to the general consensus of what the media will refer to as the "metal community", but what in fact is simply a bunch of posers trying to sound trendy, the album In The Nightside Eclipse by the no-talent band Emperor is some sort of black metal masterpiece (lol).

As ludicrous as that statement sounds, at least for anyone having actual knowledge of what actual metal sounds like, this sentiment is shared by many of the most influential and [supposedly] credible heavy metal critics.

But what makes In The Nightside Eclipse deserving of such high praise when the vast majority of its content is either boring, shallow, dull or totally uninspired musically ?