back in 2002/2003 i was listening a lot to dimmu borgir's records "death cult armageddon" and especially "puritanical euphoric misanthropia". i was absolutely mesmerised by the heaviness and dark, mythical atmosphere the band created on those two albums. those two records are still my favourites of dimmu. back then i wanted to dive further into the band's discography and bought a digipak cd copy of "spiritual black dimensions" from 1999.
this album was just released before those two masterpieces i hold so dear. back then it could not really convince me. "spiritual black dimensions" just felt not as technical as the two successors and i think this had a lot to do with nicholas barker not playing drums on this album. his drum play is so energetic, precise and this sort of rhythm is missing on "spiritual...". given the fact that i broadened my musical horizon in the last years and nuclear blast announced a re-issue, i wanted to give the record another chance.
i ordered the mint green version which sold out in pre-order stage. naturally i was excited when nuclear blast sent shipping notification with a tracking number. i checked back every day and after five days with zero progress, i started asking questions. the end result was that the parcel was declared lost. oh man, this can't be true. after my the faceless record this was #2 which got lost in the mail. only this time nb ran out of mint green copies. fortunately they did another re-press on white vinyl, so the label sent me that one and a bonus on future orders instead.
wait, white vinyl? well, another surprise. the pressing plant made a mistake and pressed clear instead of white. so in my opinion clear vinyl is the most boring colour right behind metallic gold and silver. yeah, one of these days... anyway, musically "spiritual black dimensions" has aged pretty good. bombastic, symphonic black metal. theatrical and elaborate - dimmu knows how to write intense music. that reminds me that i still need a copy of the latest record "eonian". 300 copies made. nuclear blast records. 1999/2018.