Mass Burial: Immortal, All Shall Fall

Following the hiatus which would result in both of the bands’ major figures solo albums, 2009’s All Shall Fall is the follow-up to Sons of Northern Darkness, and is an album that treads very, very much the same path. But, while Sons mimicked the best parts of its predecessor, Damned In Black, to marvelous results, All Shall Fall is a little too much of the same to competently stand on its own.

This may, of course, be only my personal view on the record, but All Shall Fall is a competent collection of tracks that, aside from the title track, just don’t offer enough to make the record as a whole feel vital. A quick 40 minutes that feels longer than that, All Shall Fall never really capitalizes on what Immortal was at that time. Nine years after their greatest work, four or five years after solo efforts that were different enough yet Immortal enough to keep and maintain interest from an audience, and with the band about to embark on another multiyear break due to legal matters, this could have been an opportunity to capture the existent fan base as well as bring in new listeners, by presenting something that built on or at very least borrowed from Sons’ best moments. Instead, what lies beyond the title track are seven more songs that all sorta blur together, and are good, but never approach the highlights of Sons, and that feels like a wasted opportunity.  

It’s weird, because the remainder of All Shall Fall is not bad; it’s just disinteresting, not powerful enough to hold the attention paid to it. Opening title track does offer a brief glimpse of some new maneuvers in the bands’ repertoire, including a slowed down chorus that features the closest thing to clean singing from Abbath in the entire history of the band: no cleans, but a slower, more measured croak attempting to hold notes. Interesting, coming after the trend of Metal from 2000 to about 2007 maybe of having a clean vocal here and/or there, sometimes morphing into being the vocal approach the band would employ moving forward (see: Soilwork). Lots of bands had been playing around with this, and a number of them peers or contemporaries of Immortal in the more melodic or symphonic Black Metal realm. Dimmu Borgir and Enslaved are the almost immediately obvious examples, as is the previously parenthetically posited Soilwork, and if “All Shall Fall” is Immortals’ stab at it, it turned out pretty alright.

But just “alright”. That again is the issue with the album: it’s fine, but it’s just alright. Nothing catches the same feelings or frenzy as previous works, and nothing other than that is an actual let down. This is a good listen, but misses the consistent thrill of Sons or older works like At the Heart of Winter or Pure Holocaust.  Personally, I don’t find this as enjoyable as Abbath’s solo works, either of them. It’s an album that’s really just here, and not a lot else. This is not a new issue or phenomena, as plenty of bands have ‘this’ album in their catalog. I get a sort of vibe from this that I got long ago from Ritual fromBlack Dahlia Murder: after a really good album, as well as a personal favorite album, the band released another album that was fine, but paled in comparison. But with Ritual, there was a chance that it didn’t work for me because of fatigue with the band, having spent a lot of time listening to them in order to complete their Mass Burial. With All Shall Fall, this general apathetic malaise has been in effect since the maybe third or fourth time I’d heard this, back when it was first released. So this is not really attributable to apathy or some recent assessment of the work, but rather an assessment that has been with me for quite some time.

Well, they can’t all be zingers, and even a band that has enjoyed Immortal’s consistency is bound to trip once in a while. It always feels strange saying that a record that is totally competent and is not bad so much as it is bland doesn’t work for me, but that would fit All Shall Fall pretty well. If Damned in Black and Sons of Northern Darkness are the version of Immortal you really enjoy, you will like All Shall Fall. It just seems like a third attempt at the same thing, and in this case, the third time was not the charm.