A History Of Norwegian Black Metal

Angst Skvadron ‘Sweet Poison’ Agonia Rec
	Mature, melancholic, and full of avant-garde emotion draped soundscapes. This is the bands second album and once more we are hurled in to a post black metal experimentation. Raw astral black metal meets a VoiVod/ Ved Buens Ende mind fuck. Angst Skvadron is the brainchild of Norwegian musician T. Nefas, known for his work in Urgehal, Kvist, In Lingua Mortua, Vulture Lord and Beastcraft, among others. Here we have a melodic spacey set of songs that are imbued with a haunting far-flung atmosphere far removed form the aural blitzkrieg of Urgehal or the hammering rib breaking tumult of Beastcraft. This is a far more refined, albeit strange trip into territory more familiar to VoiVod as those off beat
riffs and guitar arrangements sweep across alien inducing keyboards. This is a cosmic into shimmering psychedelic progressive metal born from the a Norwegian Black Metal core. This is an unconventional take on the rock dynamics of Yes and Pink Floyd, dragging its torso into a blackened space rock catalyst from where all the musical ideas are formed. This is an album that will sit well with the best of Solefald, Dodheimsgard and Ulver in its Post Black Metal environment. www.myspace.com/angstskvadronofficial

Bak De Syv Fjell ‘From Haavardstun’ Frostscald Rec mcd
	1. From Haavardstun 2. De Siste Tanker Originally released in 1997 on Edged Circle Production as a 1000 press 7” ep. Very much in tune with Ulver’s wonderfully brash debut album, Bergtatt. The drummer is Kvitrafn (Einar Selvik) also in Jotunspor, Gorgoroth, Wardruna, Det Hedenske Folk. The tracks here reveal a clean vocal delivery over a mid-paced pagan style arrangements. Band name means "Behind the Seven Mountains", and the music is a hybrid of early Ulver meets In the Woods. With that raw production that settles upon these 7” vinyl gems [Gehenna’s
Ancestor of the Darkly Sky, and Ancients, Det Glemte Riket. being fine examples of that sound]. The music is up-tempo folk inspired Black Metal with both harsh and female vocals. For a two track release this is no more than an EP on cd. Short, but extremely potent and a rare piece of Norwegian Black Metal History. The band has reunited and are supposedly working on creating the debut Bak De Syv Fjell album www.frostscald.com

Cadaver Inc ‘Discipline’ Earache 2002
	Here’s a band that started life in 1988 under the Cadaver moniker. The first album, Hallucinating Anxiety [1990] appeared in the twilight of the Norwegian Black Metal explosion. Darkthrone were a year away from releasing their Soulside Journey debut, and Mayhem were just an unsigned entity. Cadaver were a Repulsion-like death/grind band. The, In Pains, album of 1992 was a suicidal collision of death and gloom, evoking Bethlehem and VoiVod. The band eventually changed the name to Cadaver Inc This is an oldie that passed me by at the time. I must have been on a Skunk and Cocaine binge for the year. You can tell this is an Earache signing as this pulverizing mix of
blackened death hits the same levels of pain label mates, Decapitation, The Haunted, and Hate Eternal. Discipline, is a blunt schizophrenic metal mind fuck. 11 tracks totalling 38 minutes of extreme dissonance that grinds between the edges of death and black metal. Imagine old VoiVod on crack cocaine! Savage and raw, "Discipline" was recorded live with very little post-studio mixing. No triggers. No keyboards. Just honest brutality. Cadaver Inc's site was under investigation by the Norwegian government for a while, because it looked like it was the site of a professional company specialized in disposal of murder evidence, which even had a working 1-800 number. Sadly, the hilarious site went down and the band changed their name back to Cadaver Inc, though their old site is partly available in archive.org.

Ildjarn ‘Nocturnal Visions’ Northern Heritage 2004
	Unlike the latest era of Ildjarn, this is pure Black Metal, and not keyboard-only. Some of the songs are edited-versions of older songs. This seven tracker starts with an intro of grinding fuzz and feedback that’s so badly recorded it makes some sense out of the frigid sound waves emanating from its resonant jaws. This is Ildjarn at his caustic and ‘un-listenable’ best. First track proper, Nocturnal Gathering, crawls from a flurry of distortion as a sluggish musical portrait to pure minimalism. The guitars are bathed in huge amounts of fuzz and this barely tolerable noise continues for the rest of this MCD. The unmistakable archaic music of Ildjarn has a seductive miasma that laps at your senses with its primitive,
repetitive sustain. The songs are grinding Punk Black Metal nightmares that are at times comprehensible in their structure, and yet never easy to absorb. The music here [as most of Ildjarns former works] is like Darkthrone's Transylvanian Hunger played backwards at half the speed. This is hatred set to music and there is no other band on earth that can chill you to deaths door like this one. If you wish to visit the very spite realms of brutal chaos then enter the world of Ildjarn. www.cfprod.com/nh

Liktjern ‘Kulde, Pest & Død’ 2009 demo
	Once and a while a band will appear out of the murky underground with a demo that is rich with caustic atmosphere and pure Black Metal ambience. Here we have a band endowed with a chillingly authentic Norwegian Black Metal sound that oozes Satyricons ‘Dark Medieval Times’ and Darkthrone’s ‘A Blaze in the Northern Sky’. The frost bittern guitar strums and primitive drum arrangements creep out of the low-fi mix like death itself. Sure, there is nothing new here, nothing to re-write the history books, but not many bands can capture that smokey essence rooted to those far gone days. The mid-tempo rhythmic songs here reek of that mid nineties charred atmosphere, pure Norwegian Black Metal where you
expect Euronymous to wander past at any moment. The vocals are one of the strongest points of note here. Huge throated rasps worthy of the master Garm himself. You can feel that debut Borknagar albums vocal bile ripping into your ears like a clawing jackal high on smack. To summarize; a decent demo with an authentic old school sound and well composed songs. www.myspace.com/liktjern

Manes ‘Solve et Coagula’ Kyrck Productions & Armour
	One new track plus unreleased version of the Ned I Stillheten demo remixed in lower speed by Cernunus. The remixed demo tracks are original recordings from March 1994 on a broken 4-track recorder, processed and remixed in Cernobyl Audiogenics 2008. The whole reason you should get this cd is for the quite magnificent, Solve et Coagula, a 15-minute plus journey into a dark metal asylum. The track starts off on a crawling bleak arrangement, like a Bethlehem track immersed in hell itself. The strident guitar strums and aching vocal wails and barks send shivers down the spine. This dreary lumbering start slowly disintegrates into a more up-beat Arcturus style of dynamism. Female
chanting, organs and rhythmic guitaring creep from the dread gloom to evoke a more riveting post black metal ambience. The hypnotic vocal chants are set to a piano backing and a calm sets over the diminishing chaos. The peace is short lived as the track hurtles into a familiar Manes symphonic black metal section that takes the track into the twelve minute mark and thereafter fractures into the grisly dark metal of its beginnings. This is a fantastic composition and reflective of the great post works of Ulver, Dodheimsgard and Arcturus. As for the following remix of the 1994 Ned I Stillheten demo, I would leave it to the die hard fans as its quite awful. An industrial dirge that is nowhere as relevant as the original tape version. The original demo can be found on the Svarte Skoger, cd, released by Kyrck Productions in 2006.

Massemord ‘12 Years of Mass Murders’ Perish in Light 2005
	A band who have had a few demos out in 1993-95-98, and five albums to date. This cd is a collection of discarded songs recorded throughout Massemord's history.(1993-2005) The general quality here is as you would expect, dire to quite impressive. The first half of the release plods over a drum machine rumble evoking an early Gehenna style atmosphere with its slow-mid tempo plod. We also get hints of recent era Helheim that drags the melodic blackened songs through a mainstream Gothenburg like mood. Tracks like, Burning ouls, rip through the vitriolic Isvind abruptness of cold Black Metal, whilst the Windir like, Skogen Kaller og Vi Svarer, drags you into the hoarfrost of the fjords. The
grizzled distorted Satyricon guitar mix of yore is also a very prevalent force on this release and amplifies the bands Norwegian roots. As the album progresses the music becomes more despairing, more foreboding, until we reach the highlight song, Take me Back to Hell. This is a memorable and catchy composition that stands out of the dreary gloom like a burning lantern perched on the dragon head of a long boat in the dead of night. It's an up-beat, symphonic track wrapped in an gothic, Emperor like veil, if you can imagine that? This is a collection of primitive black metal that is neither inspiring nor overly terrible. A collectors must, a fans craving no doubt, but for the masses an obscure offering that will not in its conception be necessary.

Sworn ‘ Bastards and Conquerors’ Twilight Vertrieb
	A band slithering just below the radar and yet producing music worthy of the mainstream Black Metal market. Here we have a Norwegian Band playing a Swedish style of smooth, precise and highly volatile Blackened Death Metal in the vein of Lord Belial, early In Flames, Amon Amarth, and Dissection. From the first track, Prophecies from the Land of Lost Voices, to the final mutterings of, Descendant, we are bombarded with an array of bristling Gothenburg leads spilled forth from a splintering cauldron of fast, aggressive percussion and guitar riffs designed to cut through the air like a smouldering lump of wreckage fired from a howitzer. Razor sharp solos and hoarse vocal spite rains down upon
the atmosphere like shards of razor edged glass flung from the precipice of damnation. This sits firmly between the huge guitar sound of Hypocrisy and the raw dynamics of Emperor. With simmering bursts of ingenuity, rhythmic bliss and quite mind blowing set pieces woven into the chaos, this band can without doubt create some intense music with purpose and substance. Like fellow countrymen, Pantheon I, Sworn are one of those viciously endearing bands that make technically awkward music melt into the ears with ease. www.sworn.no

Ulvhedner ‘For I Tida’ Frostcald Records
	Following on from the 2006 split with Galdrer, this Nordic Black/ Folk band issue their sound from a primitive raw Black Metal foundation, especially the Windir school of up-beat, energetic compositions swimming of caustic obscurity. Ulvhedner, stray little from a fast catchy style of Norwegian Black metal that interacts with folkish rhythms and the Viking Metal theme transcends both Black and Death Metal, with the likes of Thrudvangar, Unleashed, and of course Amon Amarth, championing the Death corner, and Ulver, Windir, Kampfar, Enslaved, etc, doing the same for the Black. Ulvhedner are steadfast Black Metal fuelled Viking Metal adding rhythmic primitivism to this purer strain
of the genre, one made incarnate by the mighty Bathory so many moons ago. www.frostscald.com