To describe late-'90s black metal, you don't need to resort to a heap of vague definitions and interpretations. One phrase will suffice: "Whatever the metal, it's bound to be black." And indeed, recalling those trains of identical releases rumbling down the steel tracks, you can't help but wince: "Treeeend!" And so what? Yes, there was a trend. A thoroughly vile trend, a genuine swamp — no arguing with that — but as they taught us in kindergarten, filth and stench attract microbes. And the microbe is, after all, our own dear, beloved, misanthropic pathogen. In other words, our comrade and friend. As a result, how many worthy metastases did those years produce? Haven't counted? Give it a try. The worthy stuff amounts to a small percentage of the whole mass. And those albums were juicier than today's output, planed down to a sycophantic gleam by the tools of Finnvox, Abyss, and Fredman. Remember how it was back then — an ancient beast clanking in armor, creeping through an underground labyrinth with a torch. Bones, iron, hoooorror! And which of those guardsmen remain? MARDUK, SATYRICON, and those, what's their name... DARKTHRONE!!!
And so this little album by Seth is a product of its time, so to speak. Not the most remarkable, but not another Ab(p)yssos either, which is encouraging. Galloping in 4/4 time was hard to scare anyone with even back then, let alone now. Judging by their Mogwai-style face paint, the guys turned out to be first-rate Satanists. Only the lyrics in their "parlons l'amour" French easily punch a hole in that so laboriously cultivated concept of total evil. The ingredient list is no Swedish buffet either: one electric guitar, one acoustic guitar, drums in assorted varieties, and so on down the list. A shout-out — quoting from the booklet — "to my sexy Nagash & DIMMU BORGIR," which is certainly cool — the guys have a sense of humor, clearly educated — yet it still sounds rather bland. Played as if with a hint of laziness: "Chug-chug-bzzz!! Chug-chug-bzzz!!" There's more aggression than you'd find in a boa constrictor that just swallowed an elephant, but compared to my kitten-terminator, these Frenchmen are simply on a smoke break. Even, measured as if by a ruler, reasonably melodic, but... honestly, it didn't click for me. If anyone calls SETH a cult band, let them — I'm not their judge. To me, it's solid but boring. A bedtime story. Too WELL-FED for the hardened French "underground."