Old Man's Child - Born of the Flickering (1995)

Life for Old Man's Child began in the early 90's under the name Requiem, but when the members of Requiem took notice of their mutual love of all things grim and black happening in Norway at the time they took on typical black metal pseudonyms for each other and eventually changed the bands name to Old Man's Child.

The bands first offering was the demo, 'In the Shades of Life,' which appeared in '94 and was later re-released as a split release with Dimmu Borgir in the late 90's. A year later their debut album, 'Born of the Flickering' was released through Shagrath's (Singer of Dimmu Borgir) own Hot Records, but attained true attention a year later when Century Media re-released it with an awful alternative cover and largely made their existence more well known to those that cared to pay attention to black metal at the time.

Although most people lump this early release into the keyboard driven symphonic black metal field the album in fact tends to push the sparingly used keyboards into the background with more melodic guitar parts and occasional backing acoustic sections at the forefront. Of course there are plenty of raging fast dissonant parts to this release that show their influence from their Norwegian black metal forefathers, but largely the album is melodic in character and moves at mid-pace. Some female choirs also make their appearance on this release, which admittedly were a fairly new thing at the time within this sort of music, but as bands like Cradle of Filth rose to stardom more or more bands copied the idea and ultimately ruined its novelty too.

While Born of the Flickering surely isn't an awful album (like everything else they've released) its main strength lies only in the fact that there are some cool riffs, killer solos (see track 9) and the looming darkness the album seems to give off at times. Unfortunately, it's biggest problem is quite simply the fact that no single song stands out and genuinely blows me away. I've owned this album for a number of years, listened to it tons of times and even at this moment find that I like just parts of the songs, but no single song. I've also always been perplexed by the fact that the rhythm guitars were played by a couple of candles and the drums were handled by a vaporous green cloud, which probably doesn't make much sense, but if you see the photo within the booklet you'll understand.

Within the past ten years or so Old Man's Child has become one of the most recognized and oddly respected names within the black metal scene despite the fact that they haven't composed anything even slightly black metal sounding since, 'Born of the Flickering.' Nowadays their music is some sort of slightly melodic metal with slightly black metal sounding vocals that's, oh whatever, I'm sure you've heard it and know.

Of course a lot of that recognition is probably due in part to OMC's mastermind Galder playing in Dimmu Borgir, Century Media's popularity as a label and just simply the fact that most people (even metalheads) have some pretty horrendous taste in music. At least they made one decent record...