THE NEW YORK TIMES IS ENSLAVED TO BLACK METAL

It’s not every day that I pick up the Arts section of The New York times and find a giant half-page photo of one of my favorite  frontmen mid-growl – but there’s Enslaved’s Grutle Kjellson staring me right in the face. In a piece entitled “On the Road to Spread the Word of Good, Old-Fashioned Evil,” Kelefa Sanneh – whose work isn’t usually worth the paper it’s printed on – profiles the Norwegian black metallers, writing:

“They are rock stars, more or less, in Norway, but they are decidedly underground figures in most of the rest of the world. Still, that a hundred or so fans came out to see them at the Crocodile Rock Café, a cavernous Allentown club, says something about the tenacity of the genre and the band. The members hurtled through a typically eerie, riveting set, propelled by tricky rhythms, keyboard atmospherics, mutating guitar riffs and careful but cathartic explosions of noise and screaming.”

Since the piece comes just months after giving a favorable review to Behemoth’s The Apostasy, I’m starting to wonder if Sanneh isn’t just a massive black metal fan.

Read the entire article here.

Enslaved play B.B. King’s in Times Square tonight with Arsis and The Agonist as support. Get additional tour dates on their MySpace page.

-AR