OneMetal.com REVIEW:
Necronomicon – The Return of the Witch

Necronomicon proudly claim to have a ‘Caliginous vision’ which amuses me by virtue of being both wilfully obscure and wildly inaccurate. You might describe it as an orotund statement if you wanted to criticise them in their own obscure vernacular, orotundity being a word which combines pomposity and bombast in a derogatory fashion. Caliginous on the other hand is a word that describes things that are murky, obscure and dark; three things that this album completely fails to encompass. If I was going to pick three ways to describe The Return of the Witch I’d choose ‘middle of the road’, ‘mediocre’ and ‘boring’.

The production on this album is excellent, really clear and clean. Sadly, this only really serves to highlight the complete lack of imagination on display. If you’ve ever heard a blackened death metal album then you’ve heard everything here. In fact whatever album you’re thinking of is almost certainly much better than The Return of the Witch. It never shifts out of second gear, just chugging along spewing cliches and third hand riffs in every direction. There’s plenty of double bass pedalling, atonal guitar work and the vocals growl along sepulchraly enough, but Necronomicon just never give you a reason to care.

There are a few moments when some kind of actual atmosphere is in danger of appearing but they never manage to transcend the most obvious tools for evoking evil, the kinds of techniques that have been kicking around forever. There’s a few unsettling loops, a bit of gothic keyboard work here and there and the odd touch of female backing vocals but nothing that hasn’t been done to death. The meat of the album is just another collection of ponderous riffs that fail to excite and fails to say anything new.

Black metal achieved saturation a good few years ago now and very few bands are managing to stand out from the herd. Its not enough in 2010 to just churn out this kind of Satan-by-numbers offal and expect people to treat it with anything other than contempt. As music gets cheaper and easier to record the number of pointlessly average bands increases again and again until getting at any kind of quality means taking a paddle in the endless reservoir of sewage that most musical scenes have devolved into. Necronomicon’s The Return of the Witch is just another desperately ordinary turd in the turgid river of extreme metal.

Their MySpace has some quite big words and some very ordinary music.

Bottom Line

If you have low standards and a moron's predilection for hearing the same thing over and over again then Necronomicon will be right up your street.