Profezia — Black Misanthropic Elite – Moon Anthem
Having listened to the band’s latest album before the first, it’s clear that Profezia’s members have increased dramatically as musicians. For all its faults, Oracolo suicida featured some skilled playing from all members. The same cannot be said about Black Misanthropic Elite – Moon Anthem. The guitar playing is particularly sloppy. This can be heard in the slight pauses between riffs that occur repeatedly and there are a handful of flubbed notes as well. Fortunately, the strength of black metal lies not in its technicality, but in the feelings it evokes in the listener. Black Misanthropic Elite is fairly simple black metal derived from the likes of Darkthrone and Burzum, relying on repetition of a few key riffs per song to build up an atmosphere of decay and disease. It’s simple, but it works for the most part. There are two types of tracks on this album: slow and fast. “Poem for the Black Misanthropic Elite” and “Black Misanthropic Elite” are slower, doomy dirges that lurch along like reanimated corpses hungering for human flesh. They break up the more or less constant black beats and tremolos that make up the other tracks and prevent the repetition from becoming too tiresome to bear.
The final tracks “Bewitched” and “Hungering” feature violins, albeit to a much lesser extent than the band’s third album. They are clearly fake and the sound is terrible on them, and the usage is even more awkward than in Oracolo suicida. Thankfully, their presence is limited to just a few minutes at the end – more would have made this short album unlistenable.
Apart from the “violins”, there isn’t much that’s bad about Black Misanthropic Elite – Moon Anthem. The compositions are fairly amateurish but tolerable, and they have a few good riffs scattered around. But at the same time, there isn’t much that Profezia does well either. It’s a short, uneventful album that has been done many times before. Black Misanthropic Elite doesn’t do anything new, and the music is a pale imitation of the bands they ape. There are worse things, to be sure, but there are also much, much better.