Metal Reviews

Emperor is just one of the best black metal bands and to not like them when your into black metal your obviously retarded and have no taste, its a shame they broke up and i never got to see them live. it's really depressing >.<

My most listened artist is The Beatles btw

It's not that I don't like Emperor per se, I just heavily prefer their early material.

The beatles deff arent bad and yeah there earlier stuff is pretty good too. I can see why you do and all. i mean they did change there style.

No Beatles talk in an Emperor thread...

Well, everything can be traced back to the Beatles.

Even Wagner...

John Lennon is now 10,000 years old.

Most definitely. I love every single album, but I will say they get progressively less awesome as you move start to finish through their discography.

Honestly, it's hard to say whether Emperor were more innovative and/or more influential than Darkthrone, Mayhem, Burzum or other early Norwegian bands. When you look at the progress of Emperor over the years, and that their first full-length didn't actually come out until 1994, I'd say it's hard to call them the most innovative since they were evidently influenced by the innovation that came before them.

As far as the first ones to be more technical and use classical elements, I'm not sure. To what extent are they more technical on the early demos, S/T and ITNSE than first wave bands like Celtic Frost or Mercyful Fate (I have also often wondered how aware Emperor were of Nocturnus' existence in the early '90s and if they were at all influenced by The Key), or even some of their contemporaries like Immortal who were kind of off in their own world with DFM before Emperor even released their first full-length.

To be honest, I think a decent argument can be made on the innovative nature of all the main players of the early Norwegian scene. Each of them was in their own way doing something new that hadn't been entirely done before. Emperor was no different in that sense.

As far as classical elements, I'm not sure you can really talk about "classical elements" in the demos, S/T and ITNSE unless you mean the heavy use of keyboards. I wouldn't say that was entirely without precedence, but I think what Emperor did was take that and multiply the extent of its use compared with other bands. Particularly with Anthems, which I don't consider a second wave album at all. But there were still other bands that developed in a similar direction around the same time, though evidently Emperor are the most well-known.

Overall I'm not sure you can say one was more influential or innovative than the other. But if you're talking from a "post-post-blahdy blah-progressive-whatevery metal" perspective then I can see why some people might try to believe Emperor is more significant than other Norwegian bands that stuck with a rawer sound.[/i]

lol @ an Emperor thread turning into Cradle and Dimmu bashing