I’ll start: Filosofem is a good album that was unique at the time and undoubtedly proved to be pretty influential (and was unfortunately made by a pretty horrible person, but I’m not going to dig any deeper on that topic). A lot of people really meatride for the album claiming that it’s one of the best black metal albums of all time. I’d probably give it like a 8/10 at best.

Sure, Dunkelheit is kind of a classic, Jesus’ Tod is pretty much perfect, and the album as a whole pioneered black ambient. That’s all worth commending.

However, did “Rundgang Um Die Transzendentale Saule Der Singularitat” have to be 25 fuckin’ minutes? I get that it’s an ambient track, but it could have been cut down significantly. It’s incredibly simplistic. There are almost no changes throughout the song. There is no climax. It legitimately gets boring before the first half is over.

What follows is another ambient track that is a lot better and a lot shorter. It’s still like 8 minutes, so you can’t just say I have “TikTok brain” and like short songs. I also like Swans, Portal, Earth, Sleep, and Sunn O))). When Swans or Electric Wizard do extremely long songs, that’s because there’s something in the song that warrants that much buildup. The problem is that a song that takes up almost half of the album’s runtime is boring as fuck. If that song was removed or shortened, I might be more inclined to see the hype.

The largest problem song aside, most other songs (like “Erblicket Die Tochter Des Firmaments” and the classic “Dunkelheit”) on the album just ride on a single simple chord progression for like 8 minutes without changing it up at all. I know it sounds static-y and cool, but it gets old and it makes me not want to go back to it.

Overall, there are so many better black metal albums that I would much rather listen to.