Отчизна

Dealing with Severnye Vrata’s second effort Na Vojnu, I once qualified that album as a nice children’s play, meaning it was a soft, pleasant and somewhat naive pagan metal work. The same may be said about the debut, unfortunately without the “pleasant” part. Not that I would consider this (short) release as truly bad. “Bad” may imply many things, from overtly commercial music to off-key singers, repetitive songwriting or nu-metal breakdowns – and the list goes on. You won’t find anything of those here. No, this album – or, should we call it EP? – is simply uninteresting.

To sum it up, all throughout these 23 minutes riffs are following riffs in a very monotonous fashion. Indeed, these riffs are undoubtedly different from each other, and the disease this album suffers from isn’t the usual all-songs-sound-the-same syndrome. All the more as tracks are still exhibiting some semblance of variations, for instance derailing on a blastbeats-driven part or alternating clean and harsh vocals. However, all the riffs are equally dull and unmemorable. Blastbeats are dull. Both clean and harsh vocals are dull. And so it goes, on this desperately flat country road, until the end, where nobody regrets a single second this albums is so short (even if the closing instrumental track at least offers ONE well-found traditional-inspired leading tune). Longer, it would have probably been unbearable.

The primitive aspect of this release all the more comes to light as the band will later re-use the second track Bylye Vremena on the following album (it’s indeed the ending track on Na Vojnu), and it would just take a single listen to appreciate the gap separating the two versions: the second one is as light and charming as the first one is weighty and clumsy. Further, this quick comparison would also point out how much the bass is prominent on the album we’re dealing with, ending up being another matter of annoyance. Eventually singer Aleksandr Nevskij, who’ll exhibit a rather pleasant deep voice on later releases, here seems to take much pain to articulate nothing more than far-fetched, monotonous litanies.

And, last but not least, this album is overall too slow. Severnye Vrata may be a pagan metal act, but surprisingly a couple of tracks here seem to be leaning to nothing less than doom metal. Of course, all squares are rectangles but the opposite is wrong, in the same way if doom implies slowness every slow song isn’t doom. However if the fourth track and its slow, creeping, plaintive guitar isn’t reminiscent of Candlemass, you can disregard everything I’ve ever said. What doesn’t mean this song is particularly good, lacking of as much relief as its counterparts. Indeed, I don’t know if the band was even conscious of the doom-ish side of their work, given how much it’s distant from everything they’ll later record.

Thus even if Severnye Vrata will probably never reach the same level as their fellow-countrymen of Svarga or Arkona, they’ve nonetheless already recorded far more interesting stuff than those 23 minutes of unnoticeable pagan metal stammering. Well, just ignore it.

Highlights: the ending track (just have a look at the title to understand why I don’t bother about writing it)