Lords of Chaos
The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground
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Lords of Chaos
Narrated by:
Fred Berman
Buy Now for $27.99
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Narrated by:
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Fred Berman
About this listen
“The most incredible story in the history of music...a heavyweight book.” (Kerrang!)
“An unusual combination of true crime journalism, rock and roll reporting and underground obsessiveness, Lords of Chaos turns into one of the more fascinating reads in a long time.” (The Denver Post)
Lords of Chaos focuses on the scene surrounding the extreme heavy metal subgenre black metal in Norway in the early 1990s, with a focus on the string of church burnings and murders that occurred in the country around 1993. A narrative feature film based on this award-winning book has just gone into production.
©1998, 2003 Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind (P)2019 Audible, Inc.Critic Reviews
“The most incredible story in the history of music...a heavyweight book.” (Kerrang!)
“An unusual combination of true crime journalism, rock and roll reporting and underground obsessiveness, Lords of Chaos turns into one of the more fascinating reads in a long time.” (The Denver Post)
From the surface, it seems that Lords of Chaos is a book that gives us a history of how Black Metal came to be in the music world, particularly concerning its Norwegian routes. It does in fact start off like that, but as soon as it mentions all it can about Mayhem and the death of band member Dead, it turns into a Mayhem biography. From Dead's suicide to Euronymous's murder, the book steers very clear of what it begins to do. Not to mention the constant interruption in each chapter to showcase interviews with Varg Vikernes, making him out as a martyr type to the genre, when if you look him up he is a very controversial figure outside the music he's known for.
I told a friend of mine who is way more knowledgeable about the black metal scene I was reading this book, and what he informed me was that die-hards in the genre's scene call out this book for glorifying Black Metal's early days of murder, church burnings, antisemitic and homophobic behaviours as these are no longer part of the scene.
While I do completely understand this book was written in 1997 and the new edition was released some years later, it fails to capture the idea that Black Metal should be a genre worth delving into because of its dark history.
I don't think even back in the time of its publication would this book win me overhearing that this genre was littered with the idea that black metal is the ultimate "satanic right-wing" music genre.
The narrator, Fred Berman, reads the book in the way you should expect from a book of this nature, like a movie/cartoon villain. This is fitting for this book if not lose its lustre after a while. I've heard his voice in other works and I feel he was not suited to read a book of this nature, maybe more fitting for fictional horror books, or a cast member in an audio drama.
In the end, if you want to look up and listen to any of the bands in this book, I suggest doing your own research into them and listening to their music with an open mind. This book won't do the scene any justice, I doubt it did then, and I doubt it will now decades after the first mention of the genre.
Lords of Chaos stopped being chaotic when the bands going goblin mode can't be taken seriously anymore.
Black Metal - Real Chaos or Edgy for Edgy Sake
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Takes the reader right into the dark world of Black Metal. 5 Stars
Fantastic insight into the world of Black Metal.
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Listened to it three times this year
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Interesting in parts
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