ENSLAVED — Blodhemn (review)

ENSLAVED — Blodhemn album cover Album · 1998 · Black Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
bonnek
Enslaved finally decided to produce an album professionally and it pays. This is Frost revisited with a blasting production: raw, crisp, sharp but also well balanced and powerful.

After the Nordic epic black metal of Eld, Enslaved returned to the shorter and more furious format of their defining album Frost. As with all the best of black metal, the music has a big majestic impact bound to entrance you with its relentless drone. The extremely aggressive Urtical Gods serves as an example and will bludgeon everyone who cares to listen with an open mind.

As an album this suffers from the well know metal syndrome called “Hey that sounds cool! Let’s do that trick on every bar of every song we write on all our albums”. This makes most tracks unnecessary except for a few gems like the mentioned Urtical Gods, Eit Auga Til Mimir, Blodhemn and the epic Nordic folk of Suttings Mjod.

After the next album, Enslaved grew into a progressive black metal unit that will be more pleasing to the prog oriented audiences. For me, they lost something in the process. Especially on Ruun and Vertebrae Enslaved lost their edge somewhat in the next decade. Well they have lots of edge to make up for that! The next album Mardraum would loosen things a bit and perfect this style.
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