My top 5 black metal albums in order (the first 3 are VERY close)
Darkthrone - A Blaze in the Northern Sky
Ulver - Nattens Madrigal
Darkthrone - Transylvanian Hunger
Satyricon - Rebel Extravaganza
Bathory - Under the Sign of the Black Mark
I'm definitely WAY more into the raw, lo-fi shit than the polished stuff.
As for Ulver, I listened to Bergtatt recently and I thought it was boring and cheesy. They were technically inferior musicians on that album too (note lame guitar solos on Bergtatt and the masterful shredding on Nattens Madrigal). The cleanness of the production irks me too. Nattens Madrigal is in your face treble all the time. Listening to the overtones instead of the fundamentals makes for a more varied listening experience even if the stuff they're explicitly playing is equally straightforward and repetative. The "straightforward" characteristic goes totally out the window on the last song on NM that has this swirling part in the middle with lots of dissonance and feedback which, when it progresses back into the "chorus" with the keyboards sounds fucking scary. Other more subtle intresting things about NM are the bass playing, vaguely contrapuntal guitar riffs and the fact that the drummer plays a constant slow blast beat with no fills whatsoever for an entire 6 minute song. It's intense but also makes me laugh sometimes.
As for Emperor, I only like the Nightside Eclipse and the more brutal moments of Anthems (mainly because it's so fast). I recently heard Wrath of the Tyrant in a store though and I was shocked at how primitive and punky it sounded (YES!) and how the keyboards didn't sound too cheesy. Perhaps the lo-fi recording tempered the keyboards. The recent albums have a handful of cool parts but I can't get into them overall.
Satyricon had some good songs on Nemesis Divina but I like that they totally dropped the pseudo midieval stuff and started writing quirky, dissonant and brutal stuff. The production is almost too clean and detailed but it's also really cold and harsh sounding to my ears which still works for me. Also, the last 3 minutes of the album are a continuous and very fast blast beat. That combined with what the multi-layered guitars is totally hypnotizing.
I like early Bathory for the catchy riffs, acerbic vocals and the fact that the production is really ugly sounding. The Return sounds like it was recorded by Bestial Warlust and remixed by Wolf Eyes. Under the Sign of the Black Mark has less intense production but better songwriting though.
Darkthrone is definitely my favorite black metal band - by far. I was initially put off by the racist, anti-semetic things Fenriz said in the early 90s but I've read a number of recent interviews in which he came across as earnestly non-racist (one such interview was in the Grimoire of Exalted Deeds) and very funny. It seems like he just grew up/grew out of it which is reasonable to believe since he said the sketchy shit like 10 years ago. The reissue of Transylvanian Hunger thankfully does not have the original anti-semetic comments on the insert as that would seriously detract from my enjoyment of the music.
Anyway, I like them the best because they're tongue-in-cheek and their music rocks really hard - particularly A Blaze as Transylvanian Hunger is very sad sounding. They sometimes sound like they're trying to make mistakes because they lapse into the occasional VERY hot guitar lick or drum fill (the song A Blaze... has great drum fills, hilarious use of cowbell, and a guitar solo that initially sounds like Nocturno Culto is just fucking around until a virtuostic and weird lick jumps out). The production and sloppiness is absolutely perfect for black metal. Everything they've done (minus the two weak death metal albums) is at least very good.
I know a lot of people with taste I respect like Burzum but overall, I think that stuff's terrible musically and idealogically repellant. The one cool thing about that music is the vocal performance but you can find a much more intense and fucked up version of the same basic thing on the Jerome's Dream 10" (incredibly harsh and awesome screamo/grind with interesting harmonies and rhythms and surprisingly tight playing). Burzum's music is SO repetitive and SO badly played that I can't take listening to it. Just get the Weakling CD instead which sounds like the music Varg would make if he had the chops .
Other bands I like are Dodheimsgard, Sigh (I like how their metal parts are totally primitive and thrashy regardless of how far removed from that they get otherwise), Ved Buens Ende (awesome), 1349 (raw and primitive but with Frost from Satyricon on drums playing ridiculously fast - very cool since most of the primitive shit doesn't really reach the extreme tempos), Havohej (the more "experimental" stuff is better than the straight metal stuff. I like the song Man and Jinn quite a bit), Immortal (BATTLES IN THE NORTH), Bestial Warlust (about as ugly as music gets), Mayhem (De Mysteriis and Deathcrush only), Leviathan seems cool from what little I've heard (raw sound but sometimes pretty tweaked harmonically and rhythmically).
