What's all this fuss about?

Latin lyrics in Heavy Metal music are a common phenomenon. The darker the music, the more evil the band wanna be. What's better than using an old, mysterious, hardly understandable, cryptic, medieval and therefore almost satanic language? Unfortunately bands seldom know how to use this language properly. So, instead of evoking the demons of the realm of evil, they just evoke a hop-frog. Clatu verata nicto! - The most of you know what happened after this wrongly spoken spell.

Normally, two questions are the result of the fact that you've just read a latin phrase:
- What does it mean? (almost everybody)
- Is it correct? (just a few latin aficionados)

This page doesn't want to make fun of mistakes in latin lyrics. I wanna answer the first question to everybody who is interested. The second question is just for myself or for the two or three weird guys out there or for bands which are thinking about using a latin phrase as well. You can contact me if you want.

Freitag, 22. April 2011

Portrait - Crimen Laesae Maiestatis Divinae

Portrait - Crimen Laesae Maiestatis Divinae

In May 2011, the Swedish Heavy Metal band Portrait gonna release their second album which has a latin album title, as you've already read above. They bring us fine old-school heavy metal in the tradition of Mercyful Fate and others...

I'm also proud that I can add not just another black metal band - which isn't a critique. But it's nice to see that there aren't just evil black and white guys running through foggy forests out there which use latin chants for singing about Satan and darkness... well, ehm, Portrait sings about Occultism as well. Maybe they are a black metal band, but they don't know it yet. We'll see.

By the way, the album's title means The crime of having offended/ injured the divine majesty or, in other words: blasphemy.
"Crimen Laesae Maiestatis" is the medieval term for having committed a crime by acting against the majesty or insulting him by words.

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