Mass Burial: Immortal, Northern Chaos Gods

Following All Shall Fall in 2009, Immortal once more went on a hiatus, with Abbath releasing another solo album in 2015. Again embroiled in legal matters, the band name would end up with Demonaz, who along with steady drummer Horgh, released what is probably the most Black Metal Immortal album since Pure Holocaust.

Feeling pretty long at 42 minutes, Northern Chaos Gods is a sort of trip through the Immortal catalog of old, in the same way that All Shall Fall was a snapshot of the band present on Damned In Black and Sons of Northern Darkness. Songs like “Gates of Blashyrkh” straddle both eras of the band, with a very Damned/Sons opening and main riff. Album opener and title track is a good, jump right in kind of tune to kick things off, and the album will follow the general Immortal template. So, there is the song about cold darkness (“Grim and Cold”), the song about a great battle (“Into Battle Ride”), the song about the mountains (“Where Mountains Rise”). The album is link a band retrospective, covering, content wise, the entire career in pretty typical Immortal fashion. That means it’s good, for what it’s worth, as the band may retread familiar paths but always does so in a positive and quality fashion. 42 minutes does seem real long for an Immortal record, but this one doesn’t drag or feel slow or anything, going by startlingly quick, without dull moments to weigh it down.

The songs are good and strong, and Demonaz’ vocal performance had me fooled for a bit, thinking it was Abbath. In truth, I’d lost track of the band’s legal dealings, knowing that there was some kind of lawsuit going on for a while but not paying it as much attention as would have been needed to really know what was going on, but apparently the contest was fairly peaceful between Abbath and Demonaz, meaning that unlike a similar situation which befell Gorgoroth a number of years ago, Northern Chaos Gods doesn’t feel weird to listen to. I’m not sure anyone really took sides between Abbath and Demonaz in the past, but there is not a sense of betraying that allegiance when listening to this. That’s good, as band splits often elicit feelings of divided loyalties, and no one ever really needs that. Anyways, I was not current on my Immortal happenings, and for the first two or maybe three listens to this record thought it was Immortal as usual, which is probably a compliment. Demonaz does a real good vocal job throughout this, superior to that of March of the Norse, and overall, if one wanted to think of this as the second Demonaz solo album, it would come in well above March of the Norse in general.

It’s also sensible that an album headed by Demonaz would be in the earlier style of the band musically, as that would have been the era that Demonaz was directly active with Immortal, as opposed to being the main lyricist later on. This is a much more Black Metal record than the last few Immortal releases had been, as multiple interviews have Abbath on record as saying that the strict nature of the genre was no longer a thing he enjoyed or wanted to conform to, and the final four Immortal albums with Abbath solely at the helm revealed a band that was changing more and more towards the nebulous Extreme Metal moniker, with his I project clearly drifting towards a Blackened Heavy Metal lane. But Demonaz tries to take Immortal back to the 90’s on this, and it is good that he did. A song or two even end abruptly, just as they did back in the days of Battles in the North.

If this is a new beginning for the band, a proclamation that Immortal is going to be a presence in the future, Northern Chaos Gods is a grand announcement. Who really knows what the future will hold for one of the Second Wave of Norwegian titans, or if they even have a place in the present state of the genre other than being Immortal, which basically says all that is needed to know about the band and their place in the genre. Black Metal is and has changed, and Northern Chaos Gods seems to be a statement that Immortal is not going to change. That’s a good thing though.

This brings to a close another Mass Burial project, and this one was quite the undertaking. No plans for the next one just yet, but it will almost certainly be a few weeks before any new decisions are made. This was a fun one because I got to revisit some music that had been  on my revisit list for quite a while, always being eschewed in favor of something else, and this is a band that I spent a lot of time with in the younger and wilder days of my 20's. it was also sorta fun to be working on this over the winter months, and that's probably how the band would want it as well.