Mass Burial: Immortal, At the Heart of Winter

Considered by many to be Immortal’s finest work, for some reason, At the Heart of Winter is an album that nevertheless signals a fairly large shift in the Immortal trajectory, trading the short and sharp Black metal attacks for longer and more plodding fare. That adjective choice is not intended to be a slight or signal of disapproval; it just so happens to be accurate. I have personally always fought the notion that this record is an outlier in the catalog, or the “different one,” as future Immortal records will lean heavily on things learned from At the Heart of Winter, but it certainly is the one album that marks a transitional stage in the band.

The 1999 effort sees the band officially now reduced to Abbath and drummer Horgh, with Damonaez handling the lyric writing work, allowing a real lyrical consistency regarding content and tone from other albums to continue to this one. So, we’re looking at songs about winter and cold and ice, as well as the stuff that by this point has become standard Immortal mythological concepts.

At the Heart of Winter is almost certainly Immortal’s finest hour as composers, either prior to or following this. Only 6 songs, but clocking in at a colossal 46 minute playing time, songs are longer and more advanced and developed. Whereas preceding albums would have crushed a musical idea into a few seconds of passage, or two or three minutes as a song, At the Heart of Winter gives everything breathing room, and every single song on the record benefits tremendously from that. The first two Immortal albums weren’t worse for shorter songs and runtimes, but the second pair did start to suffer for the short, sharp attack approach. At the Heart of Winter features songs with lengthy interlude moments, passages that offer something that always makes me think of as time for reflection on what you’ve just heard. Cheesey, I know, but more accurate than not, and a trait that Immortal will totally carry forward into what I will argue is the better part of their career. It’s that Immortal clean section, where the distortion backs off and we get seconds of clean and clear guitar that is the purest distillation of the icy, desolate, and cold atmosphere the band wants so much for the listener to experience. Black metal as a whole in the 90’s and early 2000’s almost constantly wanted to invoke feelings of “grim” and “cold,” whatever those actually mean, and it is the clear sections on a record such as this that come the closest to actually achieving those things.

Songs like “Solarfall,” the title track, and the monumental “Where Dark and Light Don’t Differ,” those being half of the record, are absolute triumphs, even though they stray away from the Black metal formula, something that at times is pointed out with some increased degree of vigor. The album is occasionally described as being “Immortal going Heavy Metal,” as the song structure and presentation is not what anyone would have expected out of Norwegian Black Metal of that time. Never have been sure why: Emperor was already in their Anthems to the Welkin form; Enslaved was already exploring their more psychedelic Black and Roll direction; Satyricon was about to change things up; Dodheimsgard was about to go wild; Thorns had unleashed their seminal, landmark record. The symphonic Black metal movement was gaining the last bit of steam it needed to burst on to the scene within a year or two as being representative of Black metal’s current state. Surely, after their first four records, At the Heart of Winter is a shift on multiple fronts for this band, but I have never been able to square the idea that this is some wild departure or whatever.

Oh, and the production is beautiful. Super clear, super clean. Just excellent.

There’s an interview out there somewhere where Abbath talks about the liner note photos of he and Horgh for At the Heart of Winter, in an old physical copy of Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles (remember when that was a physical magazine?) or Pit (REMEMBER THAT????), where he decries the pictures as making the band look like clowns, and in truth, the pictures that accompany this record are not flattering ones, generally catching the guys in some dopey pose that is likely intended to be the fairly standard Black metal screeching wildly or appearing menacing. But the pictures are all failures in this regard, and the band does look silly, even back in 2000 or 2001 or whenever I’d first discovered this album and was blindly in line with the menacing costuming of the genre.

This may be considered Immortal’s best work because it is the one most accessible, both in terms of listenability and actual availability. For some time in the early 2000’s, it was actually difficult to procure older albums by Black metal bands, as the market for the genre was kind of slow to really take off. People knew about the genre, and there was some demand for product, but several older releases were tied up in failed or failing labels that would sign distribution deals for these apocryphal titles. Thus, At the Heart of Winter is probably the first Immortal that many people were exposed to, back in the dimly illuminated Metal scene of the 90’s and up-to 2010’s, when the Internet made absolutely everything available. But because of this, it’s also the record that so, so many people chart their Immortal course by, so whether you like or hate this album probably determines a lot about how you feel about the band and their catalog in a larger font. Future records will be a mash-up of the first four records and this one, in the purest sense: not simply in that “everything is a learning experience” or “you grow from what you did last” sense, but in a more “the band needed this album in order to break out of their cocoon and become a butterfly” sense. I am not making the claim that this is their best album, but it is a work of transitional nature that really does encapsulate the band, which makes it very accessible and replayable.