Jormundgand

The question I ask myself every time I listen to this album is: "Can a single feature carry an entire work?" Because, I'll be clear from the beginning, the banshee shriek of the vocals is one of the most extreme and visceral vocal performances ever made, and the fact that the album starts explosively with that voice, without any intros or anything, is a clear declaration of intentions about what awaits us in this record.

When I say if the voice can carry all this work I don't mean that this is the only good feature of the album, but it is the one that makes me wonder how massive and imposing this record can be. The banshee shriek is not always used in every vocal performance, but every time it does it shines with an aura of its own, a heart wrenching vocal style that seems to take both the vocalist and the listener to the edge of the human treble, and hell, it doesn't even sound human at times. Any description I can give of this intense performance will not do justice to the violence and power of the vocals, so I urge you to give it a listen. What I can do is emphasize how this vocal performance is the most representative (though not the only one) of the captivating nature of this album, and that is that it mixes in a very unique way a beautiful and folkloric style, with a raw and brutal one.

The easiest and simplest comparison of the band's style would be with the music of Enslaved, a group from which Helheim himself draws a lot of influence, without going too deep into the first two tracks, we already find riffs, cadences and tropes similar to Enslaved's. The keyboard approach is also very similar, full of dynamism and progressive music influences. Still on "Jormundgand" they manage to have a style of their own even though the presence of their influences is totally omnipresent. The style, at times, is more chaotic and aggressive, full of brutalist flashes of the band at full speed punching the wall forcefully. And when things slow down, it goes to a more symphonic and tribal tone, with lots of percussion and folk instrumentation that reinforces the idea of the contrast of the chaotic and the beautiful, often meeting throughout different segments of the same song.

What I just mentioned is what causes my main problem with the album, the members of Helheim consider that it is essential that this clash between two musical and aesthetic trends is marked in an obvious way, that's why most of the compositions end up being quite long, pieces that dance between segments of different styles and different performances, and this ends up in songs that, far from having a distinctive and marked flow that would make them feel dynamic, end up being the majority of these sections, redundant, some of them feeling indistinguishable from others, turning the composition into an intangible mass of meaningless, sprawling elements.

Is this imbalance in the compositions, and the style exaggeratedly influenced by a classic band, enough reasons to ignore this album? To be honest, I don't think so, although some of the songs end up being derivative and get lost in themselves, some others manage to reach very interesting points, being for my taste "Svart visdom" and its trumpets and its subsequent burst one of the most epic and heartbreaking moments of the album. And other songs do manage to clearly form their own sound, creating a nocturnal and macabre atmosphere at times as with the suffocating finale that is "Galder" or the same atmosphere but made from the beautiful and touching side with the classic style that they display in "Jotnevandring".

In the end, "Jormundgand" is an album with, for the most part, a style of its own that encompasses a more than interesting intentional workmanship. And even if it doesn't manage to shine in everything it sets out to do, what it does manage to excel in is good and impressive enough that no fan of 90's Norwegian viking-black style should miss this work. I personally know that I will come back to this album occasionally, because that banshee's voice has something simply hypnotic about it that completely captures me...

Let it be stated that Helheim's earlier years are quite different from their more recent experimentation phase. Jormundgand, the full-length debut form 1995 is entirely scathing and vicious black metal, and its fastest, few Norse-themed albums of the day were anywhere approaching this level of aggression (perhaps Frost by Enslaved is the best comparison). The vocals of H'grimnir here provide an immediate barrier to entry, because they scream with abandon and it's almost impossible to tell at first if the guy is just kidding around. After letting a track or two settle in, you will realize he is not, and this is some seriously pissed off shit.

The opening track, "Jormundgand" itself, is an immediate thrust into the band's frenzied existence, though even here some aspects of bloodied moonlight atmosphere seek their way through the Asgardian battleplex, with a slower pace here, or some moody choir-like vocals there. There is no fucking pity for the weak, for though "Vigrids Vård" emerges at a slower crawl, the track retains all the grim darkness of the opener, it just forces it into a more digestable selection of rhythms. The drumwork is great in this track, and I love the mood set by the synthesizers just against the horizon. "Nidr Ok Nordr Liggr Helvegr" took me almost completely by surprise with its mouth-harp and female vocals, but the track does grow tiresome and repetetive until its bombastic climax. With "Gravlagt I Eljudne", Helheim return to their blasting momentum, but lack for no level of atmosphere, H'grimnir's cries like a call to carrion feeders that his entrails are ripe for the picking.

Following this, the 9 minutes of "Svart Visdom" makes for the longest track on the album (though most are beyond 7), and the track explores several tormented phases, with the screaming reaching a near pinnacle of vengeful violence. I like the slower parts of the track, when the percussion begins to thunder over the raw rhythm guitars, and the horn sounds are also quite cool where they appear. "Jotnevandring" is a passionate piano piece with some snarling above it, another early reminder that Helheim do not fear branching out their sound, and would do so to great lengths on subsequent albums. "Nattravnens Tokt" is the final track of the original record, resounding with buzzsaw, beautiful guitars and a great, loud bassline that moors it into the cresting Northern waves. If you've got the CD, then you also have "Galder", which is 3+ minutes of screaming and cursing over haunted keyboard atmosphere. Creepy, but not as necessary as the original material.

Jormundgand is a pretty intense debut offering, though few of the songs have really stuck with me. At it's finest, it mirrors and even exceeds Frost in vision and scope, but does lack the timeless energy of that masterpiece. I don't know that I appreciate the early years of this band more than the interesting turns they would take on later works, but there is no questioning the validity of Helheim as one of the founders of the avant-garde Norse extremity.

Highlights: Vigrids Vård, Svart Visdom, Nattravnens Tokt, Jotnevandring

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com

This was the debut-CD of the Norwegian Pagan/Viking Metal-band Helheim. And I still must say that this is one of the albums in that genre that is a must (like Enslaved's self-titled debut- album, too).

The music is very uncommon and independent, played in a rather fast way with very disharmonic guitarlines. Extraodrinary is also the use of instruments like the trumpet (especially in 'Svart Visdom') and this extremely high vocals, which I never have heard anywhere else (... maybe it is hardly comparable to In The Woods - 'Heart of the Ages') and which I adore so much. They are really cruel. The CD features five songs plus a pagan instrumental, one more classic-orientated piano song and an outro which reckons to have Odin as its originator. The songs all are about 5 - 10 minutes long with innovative structures. The production is quite clear and 'Nordic' as the album was recorded in the wellknown Grieghallen. I only can give everyboday the advice to buy this album as it still stands out of the masses of Black Metal products, and Helheim themselves didn’t reach that level with their 2nd CD again.

Favourite Tracks: Svart Visdom, Nattravnens Tokt

(Originally published in The Purgatory Of Grief 1999-2001 (RIP))