Mass Burial: Dodheimsgard, Monumental Possession

The second Dodheimsgard album, 1996s’ Monumental Possession, is a total step back for a band whose debut album showed moments of promise and brilliance. 

Kronet til Konge was that, despite a handful of sit-up-and-pay-attention moments, I could not quite put a finger on anything concretely solid about the album. I listened to it over and over, and was always pleased, but was never able to define the things that caught my attention. Monumental Possession is easily quantified though. This is the album wherein Dodheimsgard tried to make a straightforward Norwegian black metal record, the same kind as the majority of their peers, veering away from the experimentalism of contemporaries and first wave Norwegians like Isengard and heading for the territories already staffed by Darkthrone. Even the artwork is "another Norwegian black metal record" artwork.

Now I can’t rightly call this a bad album, as there is enough Dodheimsgard in it to keep it from being ‘just another Norwegian black metal’ album, and like its predecessor, it is entertaining and enjoyable for reasons that are not exactly easy to name. It contains some real good tracks, like the excellent closer “The Ultimate Reflection,” and I am an absolute sucker for early form Norwegian black metal anyway, so a listen like this one is never wasted time in my book. 

Guitars are buzzier, the vocals are more black metal shrieky than before. The album clocks in at a trim 37 minutes, making it a little more than half as long as Kronet til Konge, but once more, I am not one to complain about spending forty minutes listening to something like this. But that is kind of an issue, as there is not anything really stand-outish about Monumental Possession, and that hurts it. Good songs permeate the entire running time, tracks like “Angel Death” and bizarrely titled “Bluebell Heart” and the aforementioned “The Ultimate Reflection,” so it is not a case of this being like a decent background album. But Kronet had these flashes of interest, these displays of being something different that was going to lead to something different that Monumental Possession lacks. A much more straightforward black metal album, expertly made, but still. You can hear the wheels turning in the heads of Aldrahn and Vicotnik, knowing that they’re starting to think of different things. The second half of “The Ultimate Reflections’” six minute length is an outro for the album, an unsettling atmospheric piece that is, in all reality, an intro to the next release, the Satanic Art EP and it’s full length follow up 666 International.

 

There is nothing bad that I can say about Monumental Possession. Maybe if its tracks were split up and mixed with those from the preceding album, you’d have two pretty standard Norwegian black metal albums that were roughly on par with each other, the beginnings of a fine career for a band. Spend twelve or fifteen years going through the process again and again, and you’d been an underground darling, mentioned with all the other classic bands of the scene/style/genre/era. But that wasn’t going to be the case for Dodheimsgard, and as a result, by some cruel cosmic trick they are usually left out of most conversations, despite really deserving inclusion. Even their two not weird albums, these first two, put them on the level of bands like Darkthrone or first album Enslaved and Emperor. While both of the latter would soon run circles around Dodheimsgards’ pure black metal offerings, and the former would basically simply never change, Dodheimsgard was soon to be trending in a stranger direction, one that would put them in pretty rare air with few rivals, but plenty of junky replicants. So, even when they get to doing the work that would see them flourish, they would be overlooked and undervalued. 

Monumental Possession is a very, very good listen, and one that, if you’re a black metal purist or old school fanatic or lover of the Norwegian scene at large, is not going to be a bad investment at all. I’ve read some reviews of the album that laud it as being so superior to Kronet til Konge, and while I can’t disagree, I cannot agree with the ‘superior’ part. Both albums are good in their own rights, and at what they are each doing, as there is quite a difference between the two. That makes it difficult to determine the better of the two: at first, I was prepared to state my preference for Kronet, but a few more listens of Monumental Possession made me realize that a comparison was tough, and a judgement more so. But the album is also tough to recommend on its own, like as a thing by itself, because if the music isn’t already something you’re in to, it’s not likely to catch your interest or make you a fan. A black metal album for lovers of black metal, I guess may be the best way to put it in the end, still better than most of the stuff that gets rave reviews today.