Band: Dimmu Borgir
Title: The Unvaluable Darkness
Label: Nuclear Blast
Distribution: PIAS
Release date: October 2008
Review: double-DVD + bonus-CD

The Unvaluable darkness is a very nice packaged double-DVD with mainly live material and nice artistic pictures in a decent edition. Both DVD’s are important for every fan of Dimmu Borgir at one hand, and DVD-material on the other.

The first disc features Dimmu Borgir live on stage during their The Unvaluable Darkness tour at in autumn 2007. After the intro, taken from The Protagonist, a Cold Meat Industry-project, much material, of course, gets played from their latest album In Sorte Diaboli, but also lots of older songs are performed live by the band. The quality of both sound and visuals is excellent, and so was the band’s performance in Oslo, Berlin and London, where this live registration was filmed. For your information: the drums were performed by Tony Laureano from Angelcorpse / Nile / Aurora Borealis / Malevolent Creation-fame. The disc also features some behind the scene-fragments, with a few funny moments.

Disc two starts with the band’s appearance on Wacken Open Air 2007, which means that some of the performed songs were also released on their latest studio full length. Besides this live performance before an enormous audience (75 000 souls!), this disc features the Gold Disc-moment during the The Unvaluable Darkness-Oslo-gig (Gold Disc Award), lots of pictures and six video clips, Progenies Of The Great Apocalypse, Vredesbyrd, Sorgens Kammer Del 2, The Serpentine Offering, The Sacrilegious Scorn and The Chosen Legacy.

Besides two DVDs, this package also includes a (bonus) CD. The songs come from the live P3 Sessions, done in Oslo in September 18th 2007. It shows a somewhat different face from Dimmu Borgir, but still the unholy marriage of Black Metal blasts and symphonic bombast is of a superior level. The sound quality isn’t fulfilling at all and that’s a shame, but the recording certainly is collector’s material for the fans.

Overall, this 3-disc booklet is highly recommendable to every fan of extreme yet pompous diabolo-sounds, and with the Christ-fuckin’-mas days coming up, The Unvaluable Darkness may be a peaceful gift to celebrate your best human-minded intentions for the next year. Or to terrorize your neighbours and family.

--/100

Ivan Tibos.