Everything About Therion Is Interesting Except the Music

Therion photographed by Mina Karadzic

This piece originally ran in Stereogum’s The Black Market on February 2018. This is an annotated version.

In Black Market’s super-secret fortress of slamitude, I was challenged to listen to Therion’s Beloved Antichrist in one sitting. Released earlier this month, the Swedish symphonic/operatic metal band’s 16th full-length, a rock opera that asks, “what if Jesus Christ Superstar but Satan,” immediately gained notoriety for its measurements: 182 minutes, 46 tracks, three CDs.

Mission accepted, I thought, sounds like a fun stunt for a slow February. And so, I set aside three hours to catalog my encounter. Instead, Beloved Antichrist took over my life.

I will now force you to at least scroll past the video for “Theme Of Antichrist,” a song so painfully nothing I normally wouldn’t bother embedding it, except it features a rotoscoped dragon-looking-ass gargoyle playing drums worse than Lars Ulrich.¹

To me, that’s Therion. The deeper you dig into the history of Christofer Johnsson, Therion’s founder and lone constant member, and his unholy creation, the less things make sense. Every fresh strata of information I uncovered seemed to contradict and invalidate whatever was layered above it. As soon as I thought I figured something out, goddamn Gargoyle Appice would start doing paradiddles upon reality.²

So, in honor of the album that broke my brain, here are 46 thoughts and observations about Beloved Antichrist.³

1. I find everything about Beloved Antichrist interesting except the music. Imagine if a mutual friend at a party was like, “Hey guys, this is Sandy. She used to be a CIA assassin,” and the then only thing Sandy wanted to talk about was NCIS episodes. That’s this album. Beloved Antichrist is Danzig welcoming you to his book collection. Beloved Antichrist is asking Quincy Jones about the weather.

2. As this excellent Angry Metal Guy review proves, whatever you write about Beloved Antichrist to drive home its infinite uninteresting qualities ends up being more interesting than Beloved Antichrist. To wit:

3. In the time it takes to play all of Beloved Antichrist, you could listen to “You Suffer” over 10,900 times.

4. You could fit a smidge over six Reign In Bloods into Beloved Antichrist’s runtime. (Appropriately, you’d be within spitting distance of your seventh round of “Jesus Saves.”)

5. This is from my notes and it’s the only comment I’m going to make concerning the actual music: “It sounds like if Accept roadies transcribed Andrew Lloyd Weber by rolling d20s in a dark coven.” Viva gothpera.

6. Somehow, Therion are popular. They once cracked the German Top 100 eight times in a row. They have over 700,000 likes on Facebook. A handful of their YouTube videos have eclipsed a million views. Keep in mind: This is a metal band.

7. It’s not like Therion make easy music. It’s not intentionally primed for popularity. Casey Kasem was never like, “This next song was written by esoteric academic Thomas Karlsson. For the third week in a row, it’s ‘Schwarzalbenheim (Svartalfheim) (Gold der Unterwelt).’”

8. The extremely fickle user bases of Rate Your Music, Encyclopaedia Metallum, and Prog Archives all rate Therion’s albums highly.

9. If you didn’t know any of that, welcome to the disconnect between what buzzy blogs cover and the kind of metal that actually pushes units. Around here, stuff in the vein of Therion operates in near anonymity because none of us like it. This coverage gap has interesting hypothetical ripple effects. Say we’re the sole metal depot for a reader. Some presumed known quantities, the Therions, get weeded out because our scope of coverage doesn’t require us to review everything, only what resonates with us. Does that reader, then, become familiar with said known quantities? That doesn’t seem like a big deal in the moment, but what if, in 10 years, that reader is in a position to rewrite/reappraise metal’s history? I bet that history would look really weird to anyone attending Wacken this year. “The fuck is a Krallice?”

10. History is only as accurate as the available resources. I don’t know what I don’t know. ::bong rip:: What is real?⁴

11. Look at this video. This wasn’t that long ago. And yet it’s like something you’d watch on MTV before learning how to ride a dinosaur.⁵

12. Therion’s first LP, 1991’s Of Darkness…., is a thrashy death metal banger.

13. The next two albums are nominally death metal, but overly ambitious. “Symphony Of The Dead,” with its crystal-shattering soprano wails and hokey synths, is a harbinger of the derp to come.

14. It’s amazing how I tend to hate something more the closer it is to something I like. I can ignore shitty gym music all day, but 1993’s Symphony Masses: Ho Drakon Ho Megas drives me insane.

15. In 1995, Lepaca Kliffoth ditched the death metal and doubled down on Celtic Frost’s gothier inclinations. It’s kind of OK? Its endearing kookiness is emblematic of metal’s early ’90s restlessness (sup, Tiamat’s Wildhoney) that ultimately led to cooler things (sup, Opeth). If someone made it today, it would be terrible. But the era-specific elements make it weirdly timeless. Going to dub this The Key Paradox.

16. “The Beauty In Black,” if Wikipedia bios are to be believed, sold 12,000 copies in Europe.

17. After securing a hefty financial commitment from Nuclear Blast, Johnsson was finally given the green light to go all in. He packed two full choirs into the studio and 1996’s Theli is the kitchen-sink result. How about this for whiplash: Dan Swanö sings on it. Its cover art looks like it was rendered by the Doom engine. It sounds like this. It sold tons.

18. Think of any death metal band that moved away from death metal. Entombed, In Flames, etc. Which period is the one fetishisized by metal elitists? The death metal one, right?

19. Not Therion. Consensus sides with Theli, if not the even more popular Vovin. The only community rating/review hub I checked that didn’t rate Theli significantly higher than Of Darkness…. was Encyclopaedia Metallum thanks to a 10% hatchet job that included the biting criticism” …it has many great musicians but leaded by smartless compositions….”⁶ Theli still holds a 5% edge.

20. Mayhem’s Euronymous hated Therion. In a Close-Up Magazine interview now hosted on a Mayhem fansite:
    
    And the matter of THERION, who is the worst of all swedish bands, we have a special message to them. If they dare to came to Norway and play LIFE METAL, we are going to kill them.

    
    That was in 1992. He was stabbed to death by Varg Vikernes in 1993.

21. From an old MusicMight bio on Therion:
    
    …an eighteen year old girl, Suuvi Mariotta Puurunen, claiming to be the girlfriend of BURZUM leader Varg Vikernes, attempted to set fire to [Johnsson’s] house whilst he was sleeping inside.

22. From a 1992 Kerrang article reprinted on Burzum’s website:
    
    Kristofer [sic] claims Vikernes’ girlfriend, Suuvi Puurunen, merely pinned a Burzum album to the rear wall of his house with a knife, then set fire to a small portion of the back door. Kristofer was in Germany at the time. ‘I’m not afraid,’ he sneers. ‘Count Grishnacht sent his _girlfriend_ over to do his work for him! Who will he send next? His dog?!’⁷

23. Opeth thanked Therion in the liner notes for Orchid. Early Opeth played on some Therion bills. There was a time when this lineup made sense: “At The Gates, Therion, Desecrator, Megaslaughter, and Sarcazm.”

24. A lot of Johnsson’s non-Therion work is great. Here he is drumming for Procreation, a primitive early Swedeath entry with wild vocals. The under-appreciated Carbonized is like a Sliding Doors version of Therion’s post-Of Darkness…. career. For The Security (1991) is ruthless death metal bordering on grind, Disharmonization (1993) is an incredible WTF that’s like if Disharmonic Orchestra became infatuated with post-hardcore, and Screaming Machines (1996) is mathy, Voivod-gone-core weirdness years before Ephel Duath. In 2004, Johnsson and other Therionians recorded Demonoid’s Riders Of The Apocalypse, secretly one of the best death/thrash albums released this century.

25. The replay review on Therion’s career path sure doesn’t look so hot: cult death metal to lucrative Victorian top-hat bullshit.

26. Therion’s robust sales have enabled them to have more artistic autonomy than you might expect.

27. It’s hard to pinpoint a time when Johnsson made a concession to net a bigger fanbase. Every Therion album is different, rarely capitalizing on whatever previously captivated fans’ attention. The discography is littered with bizarre choices. For example, their last album, 2012’s Les Fleurs Du Mal, is…French chanson covers.

28. Nuclear Blast didn’t release it. Instead, Johnsson put it in circulation by taking out a loan against his house.

29. Can you really be a sellout if you follow your uncompromising artistic vision and stumble into a bigger fanbase by happenstance? Can you be blamed for shittier bands subsuming your innovations so quickly that you get lumped in with them?

30. Here’s a picture of Johnsson in a neck brace. As he told Facebook in 2017 before heading out on the 70,000 Tons Of Metal cruise, “I have two spinal disc herniation in my neck” from “headbanging and sitting too much in front of a computer.” During his DL stint, he ruminated on retirement, probably best recounted in this interview with Zenae D. Zukowski. And yet, even while in immense pain, he still performed on the cruise…twice. Why? He didn’t want to disappoint the fans and he still loved the feeling of playing Therion songs.

31. Haven’t I been taught to appreciate artists who do what they want? Who tough it out for the fans? Who still feel it after 30 years?

32. Isn’t it weird how much of music criticism is based on supposition? I can’t mindmeld with Johnsson. Maybe this is a con. Maybe he really thought France Gall covers were going to buy him a boat. I can’t just assume someone is acting rationally. He’s human. How much can you even learn from an interview?

33. Johnsson’s Wikipedia page says he’s 45. (Therion, then, has been 66.666 percent of his life.) He’s a vegetarian. He has a kid. The idea that his kid might read what internet doofuses write about the old man doesn’t feel great.⁸

34. Johnsson appears to lack a filter, which makes him a good interview.

35. In that Zukowski piece, Johnsson referred to Therion as “out of fashion.” It wasn’t an isolated moment of self-awareness.

36. Can a guy who made an 182-minute album ever be considered “self-aware”?

37. I still have a hard time imaging Beloved Antichrist’s initial pitch. Hey, I want to follow up the album you didn’t want with the soundtrack to a three-hour metalized rock opera. That cool? And Nuclear Blast, in the age of Spotify, was like, Hmmm, can you fit it onto three CDs?

38. Johnnson said this to That Drummer Guy, which was then pulled from its context and shamelessly aggregated by Blabbermouth and, uh, me:
    
    [Beloved Antichrist is] completely written for a theatrical stage performance. … The reason that we released it on CD first is because of financial reasons. … We need the record label to pay for it and if the record label is paying for it, obviously, they need a product release to get their cash back, especially for an expensive recording like this. We spent 100,000 euros on this, like 120,000 dollars or something.

39. $120,000. Also, theatrical stage performance. Don’t shit your pants, Hamilton.

40. Same interview:
    
    I hope people are smart enough to realize that if you would take your ten favorite songs out of this, you would get a very good, regular THERION album.

41. Yes, let the fans sort it out. When people barely have the attention span to read the entirety of the next world-ending push notification.

42. This has been bugging me. As mentioned in PR and thus regurgitated in nearly every write-up, Beloved Antichrist is loosely based on Short Story Of The Anti-Christ (translation varies), a piece by Vladimir Solovyov (also varies) which you can read in full on the descriptively titled website, Goodcatholicbooks.org. Solovyov, a Russian philosopher who was “a defender of Jewish civil rights” and bros with Dostoyevsky, was also consumed by “Yellow Peril,” the idea that China and/or Japan were going to overrun white Europe. Short Story Of The Anti-Christ’s intro is a dramatized what-if of said scenario. Sure, it was published in 1900, different standards, whatever. Still, it kinda reads like a racist Risk.

43. In this promo video titled “Why ‘Short Tale Of The Antichrist’ Was Chosen As Inspiration,” Johnsson says he “realized that the beginning was very interesting, but very messy, and not so relevant in our times.” Not…the strongest condemnation. To be fair, if any of those elements made it into Beloved Antichrist, I am too dumb to find them. But still, considering how generic Beloved Antichrist’s themes are and how much Johnsson changed (some good: he added women to the storyline for better representation), why even stand by the Solovyov attribution?

44. Some old blog and forum posts make references to an interview in Close-Up Magazine #67 where Johnsson was asked about allegedly being a member of Sverigedemokraterna. Disclaimers: These posts don’t link to the interview in question. I have yet to see a scan of the interview. I don’t understand Swedish political dynamics.⁹

45. What do I owe an album I don’t like, anyway? If it’s to test if I’m wrong, why does it feel like I no longer have the time or the tools to achieve something so basic? I can’t even trust myself, let alone context-providing sources that are but another mouse-scroll away from getting contradicted. Is it to be fair? From an objective compositional perspective, Beloved Antichrist is impressive. Its biggest musical sin is that I don’t like it. If that’s the case…am I even allowed to shit on it? After all, it’s not for me. I’m a death metal guy, I don’t understand the appeal of Therion. Isn’t “I don’t like” really just “I don’t understand”? That’s the only thing I feel like I know, for sure: that I don’t understand. And that, you know, this album sucks.

46. So, how did the 182-minute, 46-track, $120,000 triple album that’s a soundtrack to an unperformed stage show by an out of fashion band end up doing? Pretty much exactly like you’d expect: it hit #25 on the German Top 100, Therion’s highest-ever position on that chart. Of course it did. Makes sense.

1. I begrudgingly accept that this video is better than the current AI scourge.

2. Gargoyle Appice, one of the lesser known Appice brothers, I guess?

3. OK. I get asked this from time to time because this seems to be the piece of mine people remember the most. The idea to split this into 46 parts came very late in the process. It was originally a straight essay, and when workshopping it with Doug, we couldn’t get it to sing. It was very baggy. Dragged like crazy. This was before I figured out you could just cut the preamble and start essays in the middle. Then, a couple days before deadline, I was driving home from work, and had that eureka moment: “Oh, just cut all the connective tissue and turn it into 46 mini chapters,” a la Slacker or 22 Short Films About Springfield. As soon as we did that, Doug and I were like, Holy shit. And now you know me for either this or an absolutely unhinged Cynic review I haven’t read since I filed it.

4. Over the years, we’ve been trying to figure out how best to write actions. I think we soon swapped to using brackets.

5. This is the funniest thing I’ve ever written, and thus I have to imagine I heard this somewhere else. It’s too good to come from my rotten-apple brain.

6. “Smartless” still makes me snort. What a good subgenre name for a certain wing of slam.

7. You can find some more of this stuff in “Blowing Up Glen Benton,” the bomb attack essay I keep updating every few years.

8. Man, I used to be so forgiving!

9. I feel like I wimped out on holding his feet to the fire here, but I was right that I didn’t understand the political dynamics, and this was the safest way to broach the topic without getting hit with a lawsuit. These days, I’d just interview an expert in Swedish politics.