Blizzard Beasts is
another somewhat strange entry in the Immortal discography. The follow up to Battles in the North, Blizzard Beasts is
an almost identical listening experience that cleans up that maddening issue
its predecessor had with just cutting songs off after three minutes. That adds
a whole lot to Blizzard Beasts in
terms of listenability, but the album suffers from a different issue.
The main problem with Blizzard
Beasts is that, with few exceptions, it’s a boring record. Only 29 minutes
in length, it can be difficult to comprehend how something so brief would have
time to get dull, but it really does. The album contains legendary Immortal
songs such as “Nebular Ravens Winter,” “covered” on the Abbath solo record of
2016, as well as “Mountains of Might” and “Battlefields,” along with the rather
excellent title track. So, four of the nine songs on this album are pretty
great, but the other four (and an intro) are just forgettable. Abbath is a huge
fan of Gene Simmons, and I personally don’t mean this as a slight, but this is
like Immortal’s best effort at a post-original line up KISS album: a few songs
that have real legs, and then, the Rest of them. An Immortal live set couldn’t
contain more than one or two songs from this record, and those almost certainly
“Nebular Ravens Winter” and “Mountains of Might”.
But setting aside the fairly disposable nature of the rest
of the album, the stand out tracks essentially stand out because they build on
qualities found on Pure Holocaust and
Battles in the North, elements that
will end up being Immortal staples from this point onward. Chugging and fast
riffs, blasting drums, the Abbath croak, and an atmosphere that seems more
cold, as bad a cliché as that is, than clinical; “cold” here meaning
impersonal, or distant.
Gone are the jarring and abrupt
full stop edited endings of tracks, replaced on this record by just full stop
endings that were at least clearly written as the endings of songs. Where Battles in the North ended with a face
full of wall, Blizzard Beasts’ songs
end with at least what seems like a softer landing, because even though the
conclusion comes swiftly it is not as shockingly immediate as the works on its
predecessor.
Still, the album struggles to
overcome its greatest issue, which is that it isn’t very interesting. Even the
monumental tracks on it are pulled down by the general malaise of everything
else, making the album on the whole an auditory mush that doesn’t leave much of
a lasting impression. The good songs are largely ascertained after they’ve
played, or at some point in their middle, like you recognize “Mountains of
Might” halfway through it and think, “this is a great song”. Much of the song
writing is identical, and the standout songs may honestly just be the ones that
are the best of an overwhelmingly samey and uninspiring batch. The musicianship
is good, but is rendered fairly workmanlike, lacking in flourishes or stand out
moments yet far from being bad.
I’m not trying to rag on Blizzard
Beasts unnecessarily. But I do think I’ve written at some point that both
this and Battles in the North are a
kind of Immortal blindspot for me, with the first two records and then
everything after Blizzard Beasts
being “real” Immortal for me. These two, which I always seem to refer to as “the
middle ones,” just don’t do very much for me, and I will often forget them
entirely. I know that both albums do have their fans, and that’s great, but I think
that Battles in the North and Blizzard Beasts are two of the weaker
Norwegian Black Metal albums that come from that super fertile and formative
period of the scene. They do, however, show a band that is learning and forming
itself, rather than a band that is appearing fully formed or is catering to
some scene trend. Emperor does this as well, the comparison faltering when you
remember that when Emperor was doing it, they were producing absolute classics
on their way to figuring themselves out. Darkthrone didn’t really experience this,
as Darkthrone, with A Blaze in the
Northern Sky, appeared fully formed. But each of the first four Immortal
albums seem to be learning experiences, or chances taken to figure out what the
band really wanted to do, and they would lead up to the true heart of Immortal’s
catalog, that being the albums that come after this one.
If one were to cull Battles
in the North and Blizzard Beasts for
all of their truly good songs, one would assemble a truly excellent Immortal
album, and it would register at probably the same playing time as either
original album. Better things are ahead for this band, but there will be one
more strange outlier of an album in the cards before the band seems to really
get its stuff together, at least for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment