Bandcamp An album in eight parts, four of which are doors
The structure is the first thing the label tells you and the first thing that holds up: four songs, four ritual invocations threaded between them, a concept that puts Helheim inside somebody’s head rather than under the ground. Invocation, song, invocation, song, and so on until “The Sacrifice” closes it.
On paper that is an old idea and a good one. In practice something strange has happened to the balance of power between the two kinds of track.
The four songs are held in a vice. “The Other Realm”, “Manifestation Of Madness”, “A Burden Of Hope” and “The Sacrifice” sit at the same level to within a tenth of a decibel, share a tonal centre within a hundred hertz of each other, and keep the distance between their quiet and loud passages inside a four to seven decibel band. Four songs that measure as near identical objects. Whatever happens inside them, and there is melody and real playing inside them, none of it is allowed to change the shape of the thing you are hearing.
The four invocations are where all the movement went. “Invocation III” runs twelve to fifteen decibels below the songs, with almost nothing above the midrange and nearly half its energy sitting in the low middle. “Final Invocation” is the most open thing on the record by a wide margin. These are the passages where the album inhales.
What that does to a record about being trapped
You can argue this either way, and the album is good enough that the argument is worth having.
The generous reading is that it fits. This is a record about a mind that cannot get out of its own loop, and four songs that refuse to change intensity are a fair sonic image of exactly that. The invocations then function as the only places where the pressure lifts, which is what a ritual is supposed to do.
The less generous reading, which I think is the right one, is that the songs have been mastered into that shape rather than written into it. A band twenty years into melodic black metal, now a five piece, with a concept this carefully drawn, has written four pieces with internal dynamics that never reach the listener. The evidence is in the invocations: they prove the record could have breathed. Somebody decided the songs should not.
“A Burden Of Hope” suffers most. It is the most compressed track here by measurement and the one whose title promises the widest emotional swing, and those two facts sitting together on the same piece is the album’s central frustration in miniature.
Two housekeeping notes, because they affect anyone who presses play. The Bandcamp stream opens with two tracks labelled as album teasers before the record itself starts, so the first thing you hear is promotional material rather than “Invocation I”. And the four invocations, played apart from the songs, hold together as a suite of their own. Whether that is a compliment depends on how you feel about an album whose connective tissue is its best argument.
The sleeve is high contrast black and white with a knotwork border, a valknut and a helm of awe in the margins, and at its centre a bare chested figure slumped on rock with concentric rings radiating out behind the bowed head. Standard iconography for the genre, executed well, and the rings are the one idea in it: a halo drawn as interference.
Twenty years is long enough to have earned the right to a concept record. This is one, and the writing deserved a master that let it move.
Measured side by side, the songs and the interludes on this record barely belong to the same release. The four songs land within a tenth of a decibel of one another in average level, hold their tonal centre inside a hundred hertz, and keep the span between their softest and loudest passages in a narrow four to seven decibel range, which is unusually uniform even for modern black metal. The interludes sit somewhere else entirely. “Invocation III” drops more than fifteen decibels below the songs, with almost half its energy in the low midrange and effectively nothing above five kilohertz, and “Final Invocation” carries by a wide margin the biggest gap between peak and average on the record. “A Burden Of Hope” is the most tightly compressed track of the eight. The album’s entire dynamic range lives in the passages between the songs rather than inside them.
Standout tracks: The Other Realm, Final Invocation, The Sacrifice
