The slight bummer news: that’s the best song on the album. Top-shelf 2nd wave black metal with an energy that’s as bright and welcome as freshly fallen snow. Sure, it feels like a perfectly placed BLECH is missing right around the 2:05 mark, but the ripping lead that cracks the glacier thirty seconds later makes up for it. Storming ice breaks through the door and frosts your eyeballs and earholes into diamonds. Classic Immortal with every ounce of the fury rekindled from the Pure Holocaust days.
Really, beyond the fact that these songs are once again dedicated to a mythical realm where ravens become proper nouns and snow, ice and mountains make up the requisite Mirepoix, Northern Chaos Gods is a very serious record that throws a very, very serious nod to the days when black metal callously killed with coldness. Icy, pelting riffs (welcome-the-fuck back, Demonaz), flailing drums, goatish gnarls and moments where you can actually hear the session bass (provided courtesy of knob-twiddler, Peter Tägtgren)-no other elaboration or gingerbreading allowed. The album cover is a very simple black and white, the two members are portrayed in classic black and white, and the music is delivered in a very black and white manner. And YES because even with all his quirks, Abbath does indeed possess a dynamic gremlin voice quality that adds a level of potency and panache, and Demonaz’s snarl-while clearly and VERY admirably recalling Quorthon’s earliest days-is pretty straightforward from start to finish.Īnd let’s be clear: straightforward is pretty much the name of the game here. NO because his absence allows Demonaz to consummate his preference for early Bathory-styled black metal without the burden of wondering if Abbath might force an awkward horn section while everyone else is busy burning leather.
The answer, unsurprisingly, is yes and no. The most obvious question here is whether or not Immortal will miss the unique charisma of the Blechermeister Meisterblecher. “Hold the door! Hold the door!! HORGH THE DOOR!!” So yeah, Northern Chaos Gods is kind of a big fucking deal. This is the first Immortal record he’s composed and played on since 1997’s Blizzard Beasts. In 2014, Demonaz Doom Occulta finally received the surgery needed to repair the tendonitis that limited him to a lyric writing role from the days of At the Heart of Winter up to and including 2009’s All Shall Fall. Meanwhile, on the other side of the snow fence… Basically, Abbath Doom Occulta took his ball and went home, and then he quickly started a new band cleverly dubbed Abbath and released a solid but flawed album in 2016 shrewdly titled Abbath. That’s the very basic rundown of recent events over at Blashyrkh Industrial Smoothing headquarters for those who’ve been stranded on an island for the last three years. The dude who prompts statements such as, “Man, I love that guy, but I probably wouldn’t want to go into business with him.”ĭemonaz, Abbath and Horgh were in business together, and then they decided to no longer be in business together. The kind of fellow who conceivably comes out of the shower wearing aviators. The sort of guy you might not hear a word from for six months, but then he suddenly shows up to a party two hours early, lit like a lamp and mystifyingly shirtless.
And a version that isn’t perhaps, you know, renting the cottage right out back. Well, at least the version of Abbath the public is used to seeing crop up now and again. Label: Nuclear Blast.In a perfect world that embraces the ludicrous and terrifying with equal enthusiasm, everyone has a guy similar to Olve “Abbath” Eikemo in their crew of friends.
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