A bit older release but it just arrived to my eye and ear and legends deserve a review in this webzine. Kampfar from Norway have been in the scene for almost 30 years now, from 1994 mastermind Dolk and his gang deliver their mixture of Norwegian black metal, pagan metal and folk in long epics and this is their brand new opus containing 6 songs coming just under 45 minutes long. For those who don’t know yet, Kampfar is ancient Norse war cry meaning Odin or Wotan. Lyrics are again in Norwegian titles but sung in English as I could hear at times about heritage, nature, battles, pride and staying true at least it is how I understood them from translating titles. It is fascinating how Kampfar builds up from aggressive blasts of raw heritage of Norse black metal to more gentle acoustic atmospheric melodies and then mid tempo pagan almost ritualistic song parts. Although there are longer songs on almost every Kampfar release, there is not one second they get boring, at the contrary, they are exciting if you open your mind and let the music take you to mountains, north wind on your face and standing proud never letting them grind you down, warrior’s heart is hard to stop. My personal favorites: Urkraft, Flammen Fra Nord, Rekviem.
You may say what you want but Darkthrone are explorers. Besides being black metal legends who released couple of milestone albums in black metal genre they decided to explore metal and musical boundaries and not giving a fuck what anybody thinks about that. Main occupation of Darkthrone’s music last couple of years is 80ies metal with Fenriz being an absolute encyclopedia of metal and underground. For me personally, the best phase in last couple of years of so, was more melodic punky crust phase with Circle The Wagons coming to mind immediately. On to this opus. This one contains seven songs, with one called Koboltn, West Of The Wast Forests being eerie piano synth instrumental. On this opus Darkthrone mix eighties metal with doom metal slower side of things but retaining enough melody in guitar riffs to keep songs interesting and good listening. My personal favorites are Eon 2 having such nice main guitar melody, also Kevorkian Times. There are no blast beats on this album, but there are synth parts smartly thrown in some songs, also acoustic atmospheric parts and varied yet hypnotic riffing topped with Nocturno Culto’s trade mark voice. Maybe it takes couple of listenings to get to love this album, but once you do it, it is superb like all Darkthrone releases.
Norwegian black metal legends Satyricon prepared an interesting project merging their music with paintings of Norwegian legendary fantastic painter Edward Munch and the result, as a soundtrack to the exhibition and project is this opus containing just one song in time of just under one hour. Any fans who are looking for songs or black metal here like they are used to from Satyr and Frost will be disappointed here. This is an art album, or rather album supporting art and music which serves to add up to the atmosphere of paintings and I am sure it fits perfectly with exhibition, but I lack the seeing of paintings here so I will have to concentrate on music only. There is a lot of perfect synth darkened minimalistic melody here with some dark ambient influenced passages marking the musical landscape. When guitar kicks in, it delivers black metal riffs and parts but somehow in connection with synth parts they hit even stronger and more grandiose than your average black metal tremolos. Acoustic guitar passages accompanied by dungeon synth melodic dark ambiental music brought me to some other dimension. Sometimes calm, sometimes angered black flame burning parts are the mirror to ones own soul and black heart. I love this one. Not for everyday listening, but a black gem indeed.
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