By:
Daniel Jackson
Album Type: Full Length
Date Released: 22/01/2016
Label: Season of Mist
Abbath remains a creature of two minds, willing to both sprint and
pace himself for a marathon, and he continues to produce at a top-tier level,
whichever mode he’s in. Because of the long wait between this album and the
last Immortal album, having new material from Abbath felt like an event, before
I’d even heard a note. This album lives up to that anticipation, provided you
weren’t anticipating “Pure Holocaust: Part II”, or something wildly different
from the albums he’s released over the last fifteen years.
‘Abbath’ CD//LP//CS//DD track listing:
1.
To War
2.
Winterbane
3.
Ashes of the Damned
4.
Ocean of Wounds
5.
Count the Dead
6.
Fenrir Hunts
7.
Root of the Mountain
8.
Eternal
Abbath is:
Abbath
| Guitar, Vocals
King
| Bass
Creature
| Drums
The Review:
At
this point, a brief history lesson about Abbath feels like an
almost absurd thing to include because he’s almost certainly one of the three
biggest names (and most recognizable faces) in black metal. It’s gotten to a
point that people with no interest in heavy metal at all are sharing memes
featuring his likeness. But, I’m going to do it anyway, because there’s nothing
I love more than a good round of 90s black metal nostalgia.
Even
if Abbath had opted to disappear entirely,
following his split with Immortal after nearly
twenty-five years as a band, his career would still have been legendary. Immortal is so synonymous with black metal as a genre, that
it’s difficult to come up with a black metal stereotype (other than Satanism)
that isn’t at least somewhat connected to the band in some way. It’s also no
deep analysis on my part to note that Immortal’s sound
changed over the years. That might have been an effort to stay with or even
ahead of the times, but it might also have been because a lot of metal musicians
tend to replace raw energy and ferocity with stronger song writing. Abbath himself moving from bass to guitar following ‘Blizzard Beasts’ no doubt played a big
part in that change as well.
Whatever
the reason, there was a clear shift toward the melodic end of the spectrum
starting with ‘At the Heart of Winter’.
‘Damned in Black’ was something of a blunt, angrier cousin to ‘At the Heart of Winter’, but it served
as a solid transition album en route to the album which sets our expectations
for Abbath’s work in 2016: ‘Sons of Northern Darkness’. That was the album where Immortal really perfected the art of implementing
traditional heavy metal song writing in a black metal context. It had the sharp
immediacy of “Damned in Black”, but
regained the knack for icy melody the band showed with ‘At the Heart of Winter’.
Abbath, on his
self-titled solo debut, follows the general pacing of that album fairly
closely, though the gap between the catchiness of the more accessible moments
and the viciousness of the pure black metal moments is perhaps the widest it's
ever been. As it turns out, the hype in the months leading up to the album’s
release hinted pretty strongly at the album's overall direction, without
releasing a note of new music to do it.
Back
in Late September and then again in October of 2015, Abbath’s
official YouTube channel posted two slickly-produced, live-in-studio cover
videos of songs from Abbath’s career. The
first was “Warriors” from I, Abbath’s now
nearly ten year old side project. The song sounds like Immortal
via post ‘Blood Fire Death’ Bathory, which is a reasonable starting point comparison
for this album’s more immediate, consumable songs.
The
second cover song video was of Immortal’s “Nebular Ravens Winter”, from the album ‘Blizzard Beasts’, which is arguably the
band’s least accessible and most chaotic album to date. Part of that owes to a
seemingly botched production job, which was bad enough that Immortal has considered re-recording the album over the years.
The other part of what makes ‘Blizzard
Beasts’ the most challenging Immortal album is that
the compositions are only a step or two removed from being feral. The riffs
were fast and furious on that album, to such an extreme that writing, rehearsing,
and recording for the album at least partially led to Demonaz getting tendonitis so severe that he was never to play
guitar in Immortal again.
The
video for “Nebular Ravens Winter”
was possibly meant as an indication that Abbath wasn’t going to
be leaving extremity behind on this album, which is absolutely true. Almost
from the outset, after about a minute and a half of arguably unnecessary
tension-building, “To War!” explodes,
with a riff and blast beat combination that would do ‘Battles in the North’ proud. It’s important to remember that this
is Abbath in 2016, so the pace relents sooner
than it would have in 1995. That might even be for the best, but nevertheless
the point is made clear early: Abbath is still capable
of that old frostbitten black magic whenever he wants to be.
That
the album is as extreme as it is. might be the biggest surprise of all. I
certainly expected Abbath to settle into a
more commerce-friendly sound when left purely to his own devices, but here I am
a fool for having thought so. “Ashes of
the Damned” stylistically recalls “Throned
By Blackstorms”, another reference to ‘Battles
in the North’, albeit much more polished on this album. Even with the hilariously
corny—and thankfully brief—keyboard horn blasts straight from a 90s Bal-Sagoth album, the song sits nicely among the many
classic Immortal blast fests over the years.
The
accessible side of things is slightly more hit-and-miss. “Winterbane” works insanely well, moving in back and forth between
a verse driven by locomotive double kick and a stomping, straightforward rock
chorus. The song represents the ideal Abbath anthem,
compounding those cold nordic riffs into easy-to-swallow sugar pills. Later in
the album, “Count the Dead” is only
about half as effective as it could be because the the main opening riff is a
strange, ill-fitting radio metal riff. It’s better than this sounds, but the
drum beat serving as the song’s backbone is oddly reminiscent of Linkin Park’s “Faint”,
though I still wouldn’t place the song in the nu-metal category.
Thankfully,
“Count the Dead” acts as the album's
only real weak point, with the other songs admirably filling their respective
roles. Abbath remains a creature of two minds,
willing to both sprint and pace himself for a marathon, and he continues to
produce at a top-tier level, whichever mode he’s in. Because of the long wait
between this album and the last Immortal album, having
new material from Abbath felt like an
event, before I’d even heard a note. This album lives up to that anticipation,
provided you weren’t anticipating “Pure
Holocaust: Part II”, or something wildly different from the albums he’s
released over the last fifteen years.
Band info: Facebook
