Norwegian black metal, this phenomenon in the the early 90's, which put black metal on the map for it's extreme music and notoriety in another issues, brought us some pearls in the underground music scene for the 20 years, and broke the limits within non metallic genres (Alcest for an example), albums like Darkthrone's Transilvanian Hunger and Ulver's Bergtatt showed us the variety and diversity of this marvelous genre, which in ulver's case, was influenced by folk music, and darkthrone on the other hand, made the most raw black metal ever made, and made new rules in the black metal scene.the year is 1995, a young and a promising guitarist and musician Øystein Garnes Brun wanted to make black metal inspired by Viking themes, way before it was popular in the finnish area (bands like ensiferum who are nothing but crap imo), he gathered people from the Norwegian scene, and ended up to be a sort of a black metal super group, with Garm of Ulver fame on vocals. Grim of Immortal fame on drums, Infernus from gorgoroth on bass and Ivar Bjørnson on keyboards.
Borknagar made a pure blend of blasting drums, riffs, and melodic keys and epic chants which are really making the listener imagine a picture from vast fields across snowy northern Europe, garm's vocals are more developed than on Ulver's Bergttat, in the same album Garm's clean vocals were sort of gregorian chants, and frightening shrieks from the woods, on this album, Garm barely uses his clean vocals, and his growls sounds like screams of pain, and when he do uses his clean vocals, he sings with passion and power.
the guitar work is just detailed to every part, managing to get the black metal guitar sound but more melodic, and the lead guitar just tries to tell a tale instead of the lyrics, bass is audible, a rare thing in a black metal album, especially when productions like in this album are not like modern metal productions, Infernus sure knows how to use his bass and not only imitating the notes of the guitar, which is blessed, or in the black metal context, cursed ;).
Grim was a really great drummer, he was able to play all the needed techniques to make the perfect epic parts of this album, the keys are just fantastic and it seems like Ivar Bjørnson knew how to use them in specific parts, to create an atmosphere that apparently Øystein Garnes Brun to create.
though all of the music and the great work on this albums, there are two major problems that really took my attention. first of all, Garm barely uses clean vocals, and as a guy who made a masterpiece like Bergttat, should have more variety instead of his freezing shrieks, and secondly, there are too many fillers in this album which are really not necessary and it would be better if they were songs instead of fillers, a filler like Tanker mot Tind (Kvelding) would be appropriate if it were before Vintervredets Sjelsagen, and altough i'm almost sure kvelding is beginning in of those northern european languages, less fillers would make this album perfect.
אין תגובות:
הוסף רשומת תגובה