Mass Burial: Immortal, Battles in the North

The third Immortal album, Battles in the North may contain some of the bands’ best songs in the title track and “Cursed Realms of the Winterdemons,” but it suffers from one incredible and persistent flaw. And no, it’s not the cover photo.

Or any of the terrible photos in the liner notes, either.

While this won’t be the worst Immortal photoshoot, Battles in the North does have a kind of cheesy cover shot, Abbath and Daemonez crouching in the snow with their guitars. I love heavy metalisms as much as anyone else does, but when things are lame, they’re lame. It’s cool though; it’s a part of the genre, really. But even in 1995 when this album was released, this cover photo was lame and cheesy. Unless . . . you look at it as a reversal of the typical, even in 1995, Black Metal cover photo, which was a face or figure set against a field of black, then this picture set against a backdrop of white maybe is a little more ingenious. Or it’s bad. It’s up to you. But the problem with the album is the music itself.

The songs on this album are generally short, most of them clocking in at around or literal seconds over three minutes, and the general condition of songs here is that they are, all of them, raging Black Metal jams. There’s not a weak track on the record, although not all of the entries stick out as boldly as tunes like “Circling Above in Time Before Time”. Battles in the North is maligned often for being repetitive, and that’s true, as each song establishes a riff and then rides that riff until the end, with a change happening somewhere in the middle of the piece, over and over again. The album isn’t repetitive in the sense that the songs sound the same; it’s that the songs all ARE the same, following the same pattern and structure for the entire, brief 35 minute run time. Some do stand out more than others, but all are cut from the same cloth. Abbath’s characteristic croak is in full effect here as well.

Battles in the North also introduces a critical concept in the world of Immortal, that of the fictional kingdom of Blashyrkh. First identified in the closing track “Blashyrkh (Mighty Ravendark)”, this mythical locale will become central to the Immortal mythology, and will appear repeatedly in lyrics for the remainder of the band’s career. A place created by Daemonez, Blashyrkh is something that will help to separate Immortal from the other Norwegian bands, as they will be the only one with a literal kingdom to inhabit, and no one else will even come close to this. In fairness, no one else even tried, but still. According to lore stretched over multiple albums, Blashyrkh is a place filled with war and enemies, an isolated and frigid analogue to the real world but where isolation and grimness are positive values instead of the negatives that they’d be considered in pretty much any actual society. This notion of Black Metal being something generally solitary is woven into the fabric of the Norwegian scene of the 1990’s, but Immortal, largely avoiding standard themes like Satanism and the like, built a world for their music to explore and develop.

But, to return to the critical fault of the album. Several songs, the majority of the albums’ ten, simply end. End. Full stop. No fade out, no seemingly natural conclusion. It’s like listening to a song and beginning to get in to it, only to have someone walk over and skip to the next track without warning. Like running in to a wall, and you’re never truly prepared for it. I’ve been listening to this album for probably fifteen years, and I’m still never ready for it, always checking to see if something is wrong with the CD or, these days, mp3 or stream. And this happens again and again. And it will happen again on the next album, Blizzard Beasts. It is so annoying, and it kneecaps perfectly fine songs and turns an album that should be the early Norwegian Black Metal equivalent of a classic-era Deicide album – fast, efficient, relentless, enjoyable – into a thing that feels perpetually half-finished, frozen in the amber of time, songs with missing minutes that were hacked away for no apparent reason. The ends come very abruptly too: this is not a case of the band writing a song that comes to a full stop, as those are usually signaled by something in the song, or contain some afterimage of a cymbal ringing or bass or guitar slide or decaying note. But not Battles in the North.

This is a truly fatal flaw for this album, and there is no other way to say that.  

It’s the kind of thing that will help Immortal get labeled as some type of childish or silly Black Metal band, a stigma that will be reinforced by great ideas like Blashyrkh and also some campy and lame music videos the band will begin to appear in, as well as their very pronounced and deliberate corpse paint, deviating from the streakier and paler Norwegian standard of the era and going full on make up. Corpse paint-wise, Immortal was like the early Norwegian KISS to everyone else’s Alice Cooper; Abbath himself stating this in interviews both then and more nowish. But for many listeners, Battles in the North will always be an album that seems unfinished and sloppy and unserious. Such a shame.

And again, this issue will drag to the next album, before Immortal finally pulls it all together and breaks down the door with its best and most accomplished albums. Battles in the North has so much potential, but seems intent on stopping itself. Abbath many years later would make comments indicating that the record label at the time, French outfit Osmose, once a promising stable of mainly Gothic-y Black Metal lite bands, had been too involved in these midperiod records, and made decisions that lead to them underperforming. I don’t know how true this is, but I guess I’d side with the band. Ultimately, this is a record that contains some classic material that you honestly want to get excited about, but stops you from actually doing so, for some unknown and unknowable reasons.