You see, there seems to be two camps when it comes to this band all in all: you either hate them, or feel that they are the one and only saviours of the genre and defend them with an almost religious fervor. Granted, the band's verbose rants through the vocalist E; and committed, and slightly beyond the ordinary, live shows since the founding of Watain are partly responsible for eliciting this kind of reactions, even with the release of the full-length debut you could see a pattern of staunch dismissal or ardent support of the band's work.
And listening to the album again 11 years after its release, I really can't see why.
Rabid Death's Curse is, as far as Black Metal goes, pretty inoffensive. At the time for the album's release, Swedish Black Metal pretty much was a blast-fest with bee-swarm riffing and machinegun drumming, superseding any notion of mood building and melodic sensibilities with an almost Death Metal-like brutality and aural assault, and Watain open up the album true to that zeitgeist with the song "The Limb Crucifix". But it doesn't take them long to break up the cannonade to add more melodic touches as they go along, not unlike the Dissection-esque harmonies that would become a solid part of the band's future repertoire - and the band keep that pattern until the last song "Mortem Sibi Consciscere" to full effect. And therein lies a problem with the album: when I've spun it to the end I'm hard pressed to say how many songs I just listened to. Nothing sticks out or is especially memorable and everything kind of blends together into an indistinct experience. Some would certainly jot this down as a sign of consistency, but it's not.
There's two main parts in the cause for this: the first is the songwriting. While their craft in that area shows promise, in that they know what parts to include in a song to make it interesting, it's just that. Watain use the same schtick over and over again and while it works for a short while, the album, as a whole, suffers from it.
The second is the production. Black Metal isn't known for its hifi-production values, and well done in terms of production that doesn't matter the least, and can actually work in the band's advantage (Ulver's Nattens Madrigal or Darkthrone's output comes to mind as magnificent examples of this). The sound on Rabid Death's Curse, on the other hand, gets annoying in the long run. The mix is somewhat muddy and indistinct and quite laden with bass, and I, for one, really enjoy an audible bass in Black Metal (and Watain does make it work), but combined with the somewhat weak guitar and kind of muffled drums it gets aggravating after a while and I just zone out. At times the muddy sound landscape gives this listener a feeling that the performance is borderline sloppy, a bit like Dødheimsgard's debut Kronet til Konge (incidentally a cover version of a song from that album was included in the re-release of Rabid Death's Curse in 2004), and that is a bit unflattering and untrue since the performance is actually good. Perhaps not stellar, but good.
So all in all, what we have here is a decent debut album which suffers from unflattering production. The band, who's popularity only would rise after this, shows talent in the crafting of songs, and passion and conviction in the performance, but falls a bit short of being an excellent debut.
Final Verdict: 5
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