If we travel back far enough in time in the history of DARK FUNERAL, you can see that the lineup revolves around founding guitarist Lord Ahriman. It looks like the guy hasn’t changed his corpsepaint since day one! I’m not sure what’s up with this re-releases, because I’m hoping I have a promo copy, and not a final copy that goes out, because Lord Ahriman gets eliminated from his having a picture featured in the insert, while drummer Equimanthorn gets shown twice.
I actually found this album to be a better listen than the other DARK FUNERAL releases because the blast beats aren’t as fast, and it appears they aren’t used as often. It could just be me though. I haven’t heard the original album, so I can’t really make a comparisons about the re-mastering job that was done, although it does sound like DARK FUNERAL was a fairly young black metal band at the time who had more money to record their second album, and made good use of it.
Included with the re-release of “The Secrets Of The Black Arts” is the version of the album that was recorded at Unisound Studios. Apparently DARK FUNERAL didn’t like the sound of the album, so they re-recorded it at another studio, so you pretty much get slightly rawer versions of the songs on the original release of “The Secrets Of The Black Arts”. Having the same set of songs that simply sound different is probably something that only some DARK FUNERAL fans who’d like to have their hands on all the DARK FUNERAL recordings they can get their hands on might appeal to. I will say that the regular album sounds decent enough, so for the more casual fan, the bonus disc is more of a novelty with a story behind it.
7/10
The Official Dark Funeral Web Site
Dark Funeral at MySpace
Dark Funeral at Regain Records
