NORD’N’COMMANDER — Sacred Spear Aftersounds

NORD’N’COMMANDER

Sacred Spear Aftersounds (2001)

Label: s/r
★★★ 6/10
By Agressor

Track Listing

  1. Bewegung-In-Sich
  2. Atlas of Cosmic Fords
  3. Fiery Wheel
  4. God of Forestborn
  5. Threshold of Asgard
  6. In My Own Bosom
  7. Seventh Sun
  8. Crystal Mountain (for tribute to DEATH)

The disc says the band plays blackened metal/archaic folk. Having listened to it, I can confirm: yes, this is blackened metal/archaic folk, whatever that blackened metal/archaic folk may be. Personally, I do not know a single act playing music like this. The archaic folk component is represented by clean and quite beautiful solos on various pipes, whistles, and other folk instruments, some of which are evidently computer-generated. And all this beauty is complemented by raw — I would even say meaty — black metal. It would sound simply magnificent if not for the vocals (apparently damaged during the recording process), overly "lifeless" drums, and certain purely compositional choices (an industrial screech shoved into the middle of a song here, the tolling of bells smoothly transitioning into the song's continuation there, and so on). The vocals deserve special mention. Given that they were recorded in an excessively "true" fashion, very little can be deciphered. At times the voice resembles an attempt to imitate the human voice using radio static. And then a choir of old grannies appears, paired with screaming. At that point, the song starts resembling not black metal but some kind of folk-noise grind — a nightmarish sonic mess that concludes with yet another pipe solo.

In short, if they dropped all those "incoherencies" and properly re-recorded everything (only the pipes sound decent), they would have earned a higher score. The potential is there.

P.S. I listened to the album again. The last few songs are basically just noise with pipes.