Black Metal clowns Carpathian Forest could teach, say, The Rolling Stones a thing or two about Stage Craft, is what The Duke has decided. This live DVD, although cursed with ridiculous title, is as much fun as anyone could rightly expect to gleam from an artform awash with ditties like Morbid Fascination Of Death or Nuclear Fucking Death Machine.
I think that latter one might be a Hank Marvin cover, although I can't be too sure.
This form of the old extreme guitar-molesting is certainly far from the most pleasant of sounds. It's often incredibly complex, symphonic even, (albeit suffering from a peculiarly distasteful pretension), but still, it probably wouldn't get you very far on, say, Popular Idol or whatever, the show about some folks sing and then Simon Cowell says about how he'd rather rape his own eyes than listen to it again.
Those catchphrases, man. How does he come up with them all?
This obstacle, however, is overcome considerably when a fella is blessed with a visual accompaniment to the gloomy tapestries seeping like noxious toss from the speakers.
To this end, The Duke, hardly a connoisseur of the Norwegian Black Metal (the geography doesn't seem too important to me, but front-man Nattefrost thinks it's of utmost relevance, asking about "Are you ready for some Norwegian Black Metal?" and then even adding stuff about "Fucking Norwegian Black Metal" into a couple of the songs), still found himself thoroughly entertained by the sheer theatricality of the affair.
Recorded in Krakow in 2004, the concert which serves as the main feature on this extras-packed disc is nothing less than captivating, often on account of how bizarre the whole thing appears. In an era of super-slim, lipo-sucked, preening Pop Divas, it's indescribably refreshing to see the two dancers, Dzidzianna and Lala, prancing around the stage throughout, two black haired ladies who appear to be no strangers to a fish-supper or twelve, bounding from one end of the stage to the other, naked but for a piar of dirty y-fronts, looking and sounding for all the world like a couple perverted Telletubbies.
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