Although I haven’t found Arctic Hysteria to be a state of the art work, the album has its relevance, merits and qualities. It’s no ordinary black metal. You don’t have on Arctic Hysteria the typical posture of the genre: the melodies are usually slow, and even their rapidness can be categorized as more cautious and technical than normally displayed in the genre. I guess you can say Hladomrak has an intelligent and more mathematical style, definitely more fully aware of harmonic guidelines than usually testified in the field of black metal.
With more technical, pragmatic and interleaved harmonies, it’s almost possible to define the sound of Hladomrak as progressive technical black metal, with a hardcore/ puck rock flavor. Definitely, an interesting and unexpected creation, quite unique for the genre. It’s not every day that you can listen to a work of such an expressive and highly creative magnitude.
While the songs have a very cohesive style, they sometimes appear to be too similar to one another, which makes the overall sound of the album too uniform to a certain extent. Nonetheless, the style of Hladomrak is exceptionally intriguing, and some songs on this album – like the sixth track, Archaic – are formidable and indelible pieces of art. The album has some quite strong and redemptive elements, and, in the end, you have indeed a quite remarkable record, with a singular and majorly solid crafted work. If you like a more sensible, suggestive, refined, colorful and exhilarated type of black metal, you definitely should hear to Arctic Hysteria, by Hladomrak. It’s a very outstanding album, with an exceedingly original musical proposal. In a way that you haven’t heard in the genre ever before, in your life.
Wagner