Labels: Southern Lord
Review by: Alex Deller
Tortuous, bludgeoning doom metal that is like a merciless forced march across some desolate winterscape. Every leaden chord and crushing drumbeat rains down like blow after blow from Mjollnir itself, grinding bones to powder and deadening any will to live you might of had before the record began to spin. Vocals are a low, inhuman growl while the bass operates inside of some negative tonal void all of its own, offering impenetrable warps and shifts that drive the whole funereal slab deeper into never-ending darkness…
One single moment of beauty surfaces on ‘Norge’, the album’s opening track, which sees Runhild Gammelsaeter briefly forgoing her fearsome death-grunt for some exquisite, unearthly chanting that twines itself through the brutal cacophony before drifting away like a flaming longboat disappearing into a blood-red horizon.
Sombre, majestic and about as goddamn brutal as you could hope to get.