black metal

One of the world's most unique black metal acts returns to celebrate their tenth year in existence. With 'Ten Years Of Resistance' the Arabian extremists confirm what many fans and reviewers have known for years, Al-Namrood is a force to be reckoned with.

What makes this album unique, is the unusual and daring combination of elements. First of all, this usually isn't the typical blast-beats driven black metal. 'Estorat Taghoot' and 'Fe Al Diaji' are slow but loaded with atmosphere. Furthermore, traditional instruments are being mixed into the brutality.

Then, there is the rather unusual but powerful voice of Humbaba, which reminds me more of folk metal bands like Finntroll or Korpiklaani than most black metal bands. In fact, 'Hayat Al Khlood' reminds me a lot of Dutch folk metalers Heidevolk, which is another unique entity in the extreme metal scene. Of course, Al-Namrood has been influenced by wave after wave of metal bands coming from the West. They absorbed those sounds and added their own flavor to it, a flavor that pushes the whole thing straight towards the avant-garde of heavy music.

The album contains seven songs and lasts for about forty minutes. I'm quite sure that all fans of black and folk metal can easily appreciate this, except maybe the die-hard racists and narrow minded right wingers but let's ignore those for a while. Let's just focus on the clenched fist that Al-Namrood has provided, with stunning pieces of music like 'Al Jahliyah' and 'Endama Tuqsaf Al Rous'. Although not your everyday black metal, all of these songs breathe the vintage air and honors the old school tradition of rebellion, pride and a strong will to be who you really are.

And isn't that what black metal is all about? So I urge you to purchase this fantastic statement, just like I urge Al-Namrood to continue their path of resistance, at least for another ten years. The world needs bands like this!


​Serge

doom / rock

sludge / doom 

shoegaze / dreampop

new wave

pop / rock

black metal

bandcamp

post rock

punk / crust

nu metal

drone / jazz

Serge

post rock

densely acquiescent serenity, majorly entangled in a human emotional diagram of omnipotent infinity, S/T is a simple, yet complete sonorous conflagration of a melodic universe, whose imponderability is virtually attached to the most restless deliberation of a wonderful and honest expressive moment in time.     

​Wagner

heavy jazz / grindcore

ambient / post rock

jazz / noise rock / experimental

bandcamp

heavy metal

crust / hardcore

progressive metal

hip hop / j-rap

electronic

black metal / metal / death metal

black metal

doom / post metal

death metal / thrash metal

folk metal

alternative metal

viking metal / progressive metal

A fantastic and tremendously magnificent album to be released on September 1st by Downfall records, From North is the self-titled debut of the eponymous Swedish avant-garde metal group, that enters the underground scene in a marvelously aggrandizing and effective style. With eleven tracks – Volund The Smith, He Who Hates, Last Appeal, Ships Tale, Mead Of Poetry, Sworn Brotherhood, The Sacred Oath, Ormr Inn Langi, The Catch, The Longest Wait and From North –, this wonderful debut defies the norms and patterns usually applied to alternative metal, in favor of a more authorial and organic sonorous conception. Already in the first track, Volund The Smith, the listener is savagely, but spiritually introduced to a divine state of splendorous glory, where a brutal, but sophisticated musicality conceives an everlasting twilight of stone that draws the line of a genuine and accurately precise axiom of artistry. This grandiloquent atmosphere of an omnipotent parallel reality rapidly follows in the second track, He Who Hates, with a monumental melody that furiously dissipates the diagram of a sound impulse rotated by a diluted, but explicit viking ferocity. And this marvelous greatness continues intact until the final track. 


With ferocious, but whimsically dilapidated guitar lines, and almost clean vocals – although incisively strong and harsh at certain passages –, From North is an exceedingly genuine band. With a style impossible to properly define or categorize, they wisely reunite and easily compress in a wonderful sonorous galaxy of creation several astute and intelligent elements from a lot of different musical genres: from hard rock to progressive metal, from alternative rock to speed metal, going through avant-garde, power and post metal as well, with occasional viking, folk and symphonic arrangements, From North is a pluralistic cosmogony of excellent  musical eclecticism, that keeps on their audacious and virtuous authenticity the greatest formula for sensational creative abilities that has potential to highlight the band as a rising and prosperous act in the underground scene.

Exceedingly versatile and flexible, the strong musicality of the group takes the virulence of sonorous ascendancy to another level: with a melancholic icy poetry that rapidly shifts from a solitary, but aggressively reflexive rapture, From North comes to explode the musical possibilities to the highest degree, and explore all sonorous possibilities to a maximum, pursuing a perfect degree of artistry dying to be properly appreciated and recognized. 

One song in particular, The Sacred Oath –, a camp folk ballad that warms the soul and heats the heart –, is a majestically monumental and sensible poetic anthem of faith, hope and tenderness, profoundly humane, protective and paternal, that calms the spirit, and sets the world into an ecstatic moment of reflection. A song that sings the everlasting quest of human beings for interior serenity, you instantly envisions in your mind a night around a bonfire in a camping site with close friends, with the eternal forest fulfilled by snow in the background. Although the entire album is gracefully fabulous and beautiful, this track is certainly my favorite. One of the most wonderful songs that I’ve heard in my entire life!

With absolutely anything to be criticized negatively about this album – on the contrary, I would massively suffer from the lack of adjectives to qualify this imponderable and masterful work –, From North rises from the distant icy landscapes of Sweden to defy the perceptions of our musical horizons, with their creatively exceptional and unconventional harmonies. I would love to wish them luck in their career, but they don’t need it! Their astounding beginning can be described in just one word: P-E-R-F-E-C-T!   
  

Wagner

black metal

krautrock / post punk

hard rock / grunge

dark ambient

classical

grindcore

stoner rock / psychedelic rock

drone / ambient

thrash metal

doom metal

black metal / folk metal

post rock / ambient

electronic / downtempo / psychill

electronic / downtempo / dub

Mindspring Music

grindcore

drone / black metal

doom / avant garde