Battlefields

It's difficult to know what Hate Forest is singing about because the band members have never released lyrics for at least most of their songs. The band was associated with the national socialist black metal movement, an association the core band members themselves seem to regret these days: as Drudkh, they released a statement explicitly disavowing all radical politics, and they dissolved their projects associated with NSBM (specifically, Hate Forest and Astrofaes).

In the case of Battlefields, though, it's not really necessary to read the lyrics to know what this album is about. The music itself tells the whole story, and it's a hellish one indeed.

The album opens with a folk song in Ukrainian, not performed by the band. There are two additional folk songs and one field recording of weeping women included on this album; none of them are performed by Hate Forest. Native Ukrainian speakers below me have already written overviews of what these songs are about - one of them is a mother cursing her son for leaving for war, one is about witchcraft, and one is a lullaby. Not all of these are thematically connected with the album's core concept, but they are nonetheless integral to its message. The number of vocalists on each successive folk song is, crucially, fewer than the number of vocalists on the preceding folk song. This cannot have been a coincidence: it serves as a statement about how war whittles down the population.

The band's three songs on this album, which are placed in between the folk songs, are some of the bleakest black metal that has ever been recorded. They are not actually all that typical of the genre; as is usual for Hate Forest, the vocals are the sort of hellish roar you'd expect out of death metal, while this time around the material often proceeds at a martial pace that bears unmistakable influence from doom metal. The atmosphere, though, is the sort of thing that one only generally gets from black metal. It sounds like this music came straight out of Mordor itself.

Some listeners have claimed that the folk songs feel out of place or that they disrupt the flow of the album. I honestly don't understand this view, because they are central to the album's core concept and they help to provide a change of pace from the otherwise unrelenting bleakness. Don't get me wrong; in the context of the album, they are still tremendously bleak. However, thirty minutes of plodding doom-influenced black metal would quickly become a monotonous listen, especially after repeated listening. I think Hate Forest made the right decision to include the folk songs.

After the album's three folk songs and three black metal songs finish, the album closes with a field recording of lamenting women. This has absolutely no musical qualities whatsoever, and at some points it becomes painful to listen to. Which is, of course, the whole point. It's difficult to imagine how the album could have closed more powerfully. After the battlefield has cleared, there is nothing else to do but mourn.

This album is a stunning meditation on an experience with which Ukraine has had far too much familiarity over its history. I get the feeling that I wouldn't agree with much else about Hate Forest's politics, but it's difficult for me to regard this recording as anything other than a flawless work of art.

Identified to me as one of the best black metal albums recorded in a long time, Hate Forest delivers an album here that is so unique, it's hard to not appreciate. 3 ambient black metal tracks weaved into 4 traditional Ukrainian tracks provide for a listening experience one is not likely to soon forget. Granted that I am Ukrainian, I don't want to sound like I'm simply praising a random release from the mother land. That said, I do feel that Hate Forest has provided a completely unique sound and feel with this album, as well as unique take on the more story-oriented writing style that spawned the most early black metal.

I'll begin with the traditional tracks, as most people seem to find a problem with these. Even though Hate Forest did not write or perform these tracks, taken at face value, the tracks display great competence in vocal work (with the exception of the last track.) Given the nature of the final track, these songs are not just displays of vocal fluency, but provide emotion to the album as a whole. The first three tradionals are all displays of historical Ukrainian culture, making the fourth stand out to me even more. I'll provide a brief description of what each traditional song means so perhaps a better understanding of the album's significance can be achieved.

У Недiлю - "On Sunday" In Ukrainian culture, Sunday is a day of resting. This is mind, it is also among the more despicable acts to curse somebody on Sunday. This track tells of a mother who, in time of war and departure of her son, curses her own child on Sunday.

Проведу Я Русалочку - A little more difficult to translate, but most easily described as "I spend time with the Mermaid" or "I am with the Mermaid." This song provides a showing of Ukrainian culture most people would not expect: witchcraft. The girl is engaging in the act of witchcraft during the times of most distress, and the Mermaid is a prominent figure in Slavic folklore.

Колискова - "Lullaby" This song is simply a traditional lullably, which in of itself doesn't provide much atmophere to the album, but the idea of a lullaby being placed third, after the atmopshere of destruction has taken over, is what provides the most significance.

Поминальна - "Memorial" This isn't exactly a traditional song, but it does provide some of the most apparent and relevant emotional distinction this album has to offer. This is an album of war, and in this track we here the distressed and defeated returning to their homes to find nothing.

But now moving past my elitist Ukrainian-ism, let's speak of the black metal. The guitars are nothing short of crushing. The tone is fuzzy, full, and heavy. It proves itself as the key element to providing the minimalist, drone effect the album conveys, but it is not limited to simple background noise. When it is needed, the guitars take the reigns and kicks your head in. Are they simplistic riffs? Absolutely, but that is far from saying the guitars don't go above and beyond the call of duty when providing atmosphere or crushing riffs to the overall heaviness of the album. The riffs that do exist are catchy and fitting. I find it hard to say too much about the guitars, but simply because they are so perfectly in place with the rest with the album, that I'd be better off trying to point out the flaws of the guitars, rather than their role in the albums congruency. However, that would prove futile as well, as they have displayed none to me.

This is easily some of the most precise drumming I've ever heard. Due to the minimalistic and droney nature of this album, the drums are already riding on high expectations of repetition over considerable length. Given, if this was limited to the slow sections of each track, such a feat would not be extremely difficult to achieve. However, when presented with the daunting task of blasting or double kicking for minutes on end in "Our Fading Horizons," the drums come through nothing short of spectacular. They also are key in the more militant nature of the album, such as the marching style drums in "Our Fading Horzions." The drumming is tight, precise, and lies perfectly in the mix of the album.

Im the style of such an album, I would almost immediately dismiss the idea of not only the need for a synth, but the albums credibility entirely. Such is not the case with Battlefields. A synth isn't used in the way that say "Autumn Aurora" displayed, but it is used to produce the most prominent militant features and feel of this album. Marching sounds, an ominous chrous and bells are introduced into the mix, but in the best way possible. The bells used are not overwhelming to the mix, and they definitely do not just scream at you, "HEY! MILITARY FEEL HERE!" They lay quite low in the mix, similar to the marching sounds. You almost aren't even aware that the sounds are there, you are simply immersed in the atmosphere of brutality and war.

Saving the best for last, these vocals. These. Fucking. Vocals. I've never heard such brutality and anger in vocals before. A gutteral howl is the only way I can describe this behemoth of a voice. The black metal shrieks are used sparingly throughout, and I would not ignore these shrieks and their display of utter anguish and fury. But they are in no way what stood out about the vocals of this album. It's the gutteral howl, the destructive behemoth behind that microphone who prodocues a sound even the most depraved and infuriated of men could not produce. The creation that comes to mind when thinking of what could produce such a sound is not human, it simply isn't. The vocals themselves do not infuriate me, the atmosphere that these vocals provide victimize my inner most need to anger and hatred. Truly supreme.

Ukrainian black metal is something that inherently requires a sort of suspension of disbelief; even at its most measured, it's a style that thrives off the sort of musical melodrama that would put many off. But that being said, bands like Forest or Dub Buk are pretty easy to deal with since they have such powerful music to back up the inherent sort of ridiculousness of their style. But then there's other bands, primarily spearheaded in my mind by Roman Saenko, whose musical talents are tertiary to the sort of message-based, imagistic music of bands like Drudkh or Hate Forest. "Battlefields" in particular is an example of the style totally overwhelming the content of an album; when you listen to "Battlefields," you're not listening to an album. You're listening to a STATEMENT, and whether you appreciate it or not is almost entirely based on how much you buy into that Statement, capitalization very necessary. It's like trying to listen to Iskra without being a whiny trust-fund anarchist. It doesn't work.

Like all of Roman's music, Hate Forest doesn't exactly thrive on an excess of musical activity within the songs. Hell, it almost seems to thrive off the exact opposite: endurance tests supposedly designed to build "atmosphere" but in my mind are more about self-indulgent exercises in the same. "Battlefields" is composed of a few lengthy, minimal black metal tracks broken up by Ukrainian vocal-only traditionals (as I said, this album is a Statement) that no one actually cares to listen to in real life. They're sort of a scam; the sort of thing dropped into a black metal album to make it seem more immediately relevant and important than it actually is, and unsurprisingly, a lot of people think that, despite how naturally incongruous and completely meaningless to a non-Ukrainian audience they are, they most certainly Mean Something Important. Granted, no one listening to this album actually speaks Russian, but they're foreign, so they mean something, right? Right? Of course they do- they're Traditional and Reference The Traditional Cultural Roots Of This Music. A quick note: if you ever read that phrase in a review about a folk/black metal album, run.

Of course, "Battlefields" isn't actually a folk-influenced album (apart from the meaningless traditionals); it's a pretty boring, static ambient black metal album with unusually clanging sound effects and a distinct lack of riffs. Just how similar this is to Drudkh in construction is pretty incredible, actually; both bands feature songs composed of about two actual riffs each, swathed in murky, reverb-drenched production, and mostly require the "atmosphere" to carry them. Unfortunately, I've always believed that atmosphere is something generated by the music itself, not something you dollop on top of otherwise plain music like a condiment, and that's exactly what Hate Forest does here. A black metal track on this album: ten minutes long (this means it's epic,) composed of buzzing tremolo riffs and blast beats/double bass or grimly martial passages of chugging and war toms pounding away, and occasionally some synthesized orchestral instruments overhead. The songs never actually progress anywhere; they're designed to sound traditional, warlike, and dark, but just a static element of each of those rather than a narrative piece that actually proceeds anywhere. Frankly, this music is so empty that the album could probably feature a blank CDr and come across in exactly the same manner. The music isn't what you're buying this for, after all.

There's a lot of good Ukrainian black metal, but there's also a lot of terrible shit from that scene too, and "Battlefields" is a pretty distinct entry into that latter category. Devoid of character, content, artistry, or anything but an empty sense of stylized aesthetics, it's the sort of thing you think defines you as an open-minded and serious black metal listener when you're fifteen years old. After that, I can't think of a reason to listen to this.

(Originally written for http://www.trialbyordeal666.blogspot.com)

"Battlefields" is a fitting title for this album. Every time I listen to this record, images of war creep into my mind. Hailing from Ukraine, Hate Forest were a leading force in Eastern European black metal. This album sounds much more menacing and authentic than many of the black metal bands that live west of Eastern Europe. This album is the real deal; no Satanic silliness, no gimmicks. This is one of those rare albums that is so unique and so amazing that you can't help but be taken aback.

Hate Forest is obviously very proud of its culture. To add a distinct Ukranian flavor, they surround every metal song with tradition Ukranian folk songs. They are very unique; I don't recall ever hearing anything like them. They all feature woman singing in an atonal fashion, unaccompanied by any musical instruments. These songs really make this album special, giving it a completely different feel from the average black metal record. The folk song that ends the album, features women crying out in desperation. This is a very clever choice of the final song, as it sounds like the bleak aftermath of the war that the rest of songs portray.

The only band I have heard that sounds remotely like Hate Forest is L'acephale and they came years after this album was released. Hate Forest have mastered their unique sound with this release. The guitar work is often space, creating a feeling of suspense. When the tremolo riffs and double bass drumming kick in, it feels like all hell has broken loose. The hate-filled vocals are lower than you would expect in black metal. There is so much raw emotion in the vocals that you can't help but feel a strong sense of hate.

The innovative percussion performed on this release is nothing short of genius. Whether fast or slow, the drums always remain fresh and interesting. At some points they are put extremely high in the mix and echo slow hypnotic patterns. When the drummer decides to unleash all his aggression, he does so with unheard-of accuracy. I have never heard double bass drumming played so fast and precise. The martial snare drumming is also very different and interesting. The heavy use of bells added a great deal of uniqueness to the black metal songs, creating a creeping feeling of suspense.

I could go on all day about how amazing and innovative this album is, but in the end words can't do it justice; you just have to experience it for yourself. This album is a perfect balance of beauty, originality and relentless aggression. Fans of black metal should do themselves a favor and check out this amazing release.

Hate Forest’s third Full-length release, Battlefields is an astonishing Black Metal album. One aspect of this album that contributes strongly and directly to its quality is the album’s atmosphere. From the first second the album begins to play, it is clear to the listener (at least one foreign to the Ukraine) that he is being taken to a different world. When the album begins, a woman sings, alone at first, and then is joined by a small chorus in a song that rings of defiance and sadness. This serves to immerse the listener in Hate Forest’s world, setting the tone for the album and preparing the listener for what seems to be the band’s personal interpretation of the feelings generated by the woman’s song. The black metal songs on this album are stark, heavy, and drone relentlessly. The guitar tone contributes very strongly to the album’s atmosphere. The guitars are heavy whilst crunchy, and swathed in just the right amount of reverb. While one can still focus on them they remain ethereal and powerful. The droning nature of the guitars, stark keys, and present powerful drums along with the pleading high vocals and the defiant growls creates an atmosphere of oppression, loneliness, anger, and pride.

Another very strong aspect of Hate Forest’s performance on this album is their songwriting. The songs that they have written on this album, although only three out of seven, are very impressive and mature. They do not conform to strictures of verse/bridge/chorus, and are not in any way shape or form riff-o-ramas. Hate Forest has achieved the wonderful middle ground between the extremes. The riffs, in general, on this album tend to be quite droney and contribute marvelously to the atmosphere. The music sucks the listener in, traps him in the music. While occasionally repeating certain themes throughout, each time something old returns, it has evolved, adding new aspects, a new keyboard part over it, a different drum pattern underneath, or a slight difference in the riff that makes it worth hearing again. The songs flow from beginning to end continuously never taking a wrong step. Another place the band has really excelled is in what seems like the perfect amount of folk music influence for this particular album. Every once in awhile, just to make sure the listener does not forget, something distinctly eastern European is eased into the song, generally small intricate leads for a half a minute or so, but they serve in reminding the listener of that aspect of the atmosphere just before he forgets.

The only negative aspect of the album is its length. Although the three metal songs here are all in the nine to ten minute range, and I whole-heartedly approve of the folk songs included, I am truly left wanting more.

ABMMWUEFE = Atmospheric Black Martial Metal With Ukranian Ethnic Folk Elements

This is THE Hate Forest album, the masterpiece that perfectly sumarizes everything they stand for: Honor, Pride, Land and the struggle of their people. With 4 traditional folk songs and 3 black metal songs, one might wonder if they're not getting less Hate Forest in this release. Well, you're not, since the folk songs make a total of 8 minutes, more or less, while the black metal ones make for 30 minutes of pure war. And I mean "war" in the true sense.

Leaving the folk tracks for last, let us concentrate on the black metal, the true reason we all got this release. The guitars are great, with long, kind-of depressive, and yet so full of pride, riffs, that also let out a shriek of ukranian folk on some moments. The drums are completely different from previous HF releases. The drumming is now more slow, completely militaristic, like the ones found in Martial bands like Arditi, Von Thronstahl and others of the genre. On the other hands, the vocals remain the same: deep growls and great shrieks from Roman and Thurios, both sounding like two ghosts in the fucking battlefield that the music creates, or maybe as narrators of the events that unfold. I don't know a word of ukranian, so I don't know what they tell.

On to the folk songs, they consist of women singing traditional ukranian songs. The first three are great, and really set the mood for the bm tracks, some being sang with a choir of women, which gives a sense of home and company, while one is only a woman, singing alone with a voice full of grief, as if she misses her dear husband. The last song is, in my opinion, the one flaw of this album. It's the most irritating thing I ever heard, because there are women talking, and one really tuneless drunk lady singing, which pisses me off really bad.

In a few final words, this is the greatest album I ever heard, with only that one final flaw, but since you can stop the music after the "Glare Over Slavonic Lands", it's okay. If you like atmospheric bm and bands like Arditi, you need this right away!

Occasionally, during a band’s career, there will come a moment when every component involved - concept, musical content, presentation - comes to a peak simultaneously to produce an album of truly awesome worth. For Hate Forest, ‘Battlefields’ undoubtedly is that album. It saw them extend their style from furiously fast and raw black metal to a far slower, more focused and considered epic style that would be explored in parallel by Thurios and Roman’s other band Drudkh (both ‘Battlefields’ and Drudkh’s debut ‘Forgotten Legends’ being released in 2003). Notably, ‘Battlefields’ combines this tempo restraint with a brutal edge and bludgeoning relentlessness absent from the more pastoral tone mastered by Drudkh. It also coupled this development in their own music with an explicit cultural intent, as examples of traditional music from Ukraine were included on the album, a conscious decision that sought to place Hate Forest firmly within the musical and historical traditions of their homeland. These elements were then tightly bound together to explore one central concept so significant for Ukraine: war and its effects on people.

‘Battlefields’ comprises three black metal tracks by Hate Forest and three tracks of traditional Ukrainian female-vocal folk music (taken from a previously collected compilation). These alternating and contrasting styles essentially create couplets that should be regarded in unison (tracks 1-2, tracks 3-4 and tracks 5-6). The album then closes with a track of authentic keening by village women, recorded literally ‘in the field’. The folk songs have engendered controversy in some quarters as being misguided and irrelevant to Hate Forest’s black metal but they are actually vitally important to the concept of the album.

In essence, Hate Forest see themselves as the modern inheritors and guardians of Ukraine’s musical traditions, and so placing the folk songs equally alongside each of their own tracks establishes the direct link to Ukraine’s cultural heritage that Hate Forest want the listener to appreciate. Ukraine’s musical past and present thus come together on the one record, on an equal footing. Also, a series of contrasts are thereby set up between the clarity and precision of the female voices of the folk singers, and the deeply guttural and inhuman growls of the male voices of Thurios and Roman, the two contrasting elements nonetheless united by their extraordinary power. Juxtaposing female and male is a central theme of ‘Battlefields’, the ‘female’ tracks representing the home life and family that the warriors leave behind in time of war, and the ‘male’ tracks representing the battles the men must fight alone. It is a musical cohesion that creates a microcosm of society at large.

The keening that closes the album foregrounds the cost of war to the homeland and families of the soldiers. Ultimately, one of the most original and innovative aspects of ‘Battlefields’ within the context of black metal is that Hate Forest chose to leave the final impression made by the album not to the macho aggression and adrenalin rush of the last Hate Forest track but to the real sound of the women left behind to cope with the grief and loss that any battle leaves in its wake.

The deliberately linear flow of the album towards the climactic keening makes a track-by-track review virtually unavoidable. Musically, Hate Forest’s songs display intentionally little variety across the album, as the primary aim is to create a mood of bleakness and fatalism; the variation is actually found within the folk tracks, which are a choral piece, a chant and a solo, respectively. This further layer of contrast delineates in musical terms the disparity between what is the essential sameness of battle, despite its violence and drama, compared with the constant emotional fluctuations of those on the periphery of the conflict who have no influence over the events unfolding but are just buffeted by its consequences.

The opening couplet begins with a lone female voice gradually joined by others to build into a powerful unison that blasts from the speakers, a simple but overwhelming introduction that prefigures the techniques of Hate Forest themselves, even down to the repetition as it builds three times. Once the final echo from these voices dies away there is silence for a heartbeat before the booming guitars of Hate Forest take up the baton. ‘With Fire and Iron’ has a slow, deep, forceful riff, played unhurriedly on grittily distorted guitars, with a choir of bass voices looming behind. The funereal drumbeat has a metallic clang mixed in, a subtle but effective distillation of the noise of battle that will recur in ‘Glare Over Slavonic Lands’. When the vocals appear they are deeply gruff and very low in the mix, creating an ominous rumble that contrasts sharply with the preceding clarity of the women singers.

Establishing the template for all the Hate Forest tracks on ‘Battlefields’, the riff then alters to a second style, here accompanied by blastbeats, before the track speeds up at the mid-point, thence moving between fast and slow for the remainder, reflecting the ebb and flow of battle. This structural template maintains the tense, escalating atmosphere of the album’s black metal tracks, all moving from a slow yet subtly varied opening section through to an increase in tempo and power.

‘With Fire and Iron’ allows a space in the riff for a solo but chooses to dispense with it altogether, just leaving an arctic, sweeping drone and rumbling timpani before the riff reasserts itself. It’s almost like a breathing space amidst the tumult and is mirrored in the ominous drone that rises periodically throughout the track with muted chimes sounding over the top, almost as if suggesting the clash of weaponry can become musical if heard at enough of a distance.

These cold, sweeping drones and knell-like chimes recur almost immediately in the second couplet on the album, at the start of ‘Our Fading Horizons’, which follows a brief chant from the female folk singers. Slow, purposeful strummed chords gradually build up behind these drones, looming ever louder, before the drums set in with a rapid-snare military march, thus raising the tempo of the album from the funeral march that opened ‘With Fire and Iron’. Again, the track features restraint where a solo would be expected, as when the drums stop there is nothing but the sound of a sepulchral choir and a feedbacking guitar. At the second instance of this ‘anti-solo’, blastbeats presage the track’s change to a higher gear that thence rushes headlong to a stark, bleak ending, as the guitars suddenly stop and the drones and chimes move back to fore until the return of the military march, which takes ‘Our Fading Horizons’ implacably to the fade out, as grim and unyielding as war itself.

Apparently on account of statements made by Hate Forest (which are hard to track down and verify), epithets such as ‘racist’ or ‘NS’ have come to be regularly attached to the band, although it should be noted that the notorious statement on their label’s website (“Every subhuman buying Hate Forest releases buys a weapon against himself”) is at least potentially ambiguous and could be read more as a statement of general misanthropy than specific prejudice. Whatever the truth of Hate Forest’s beliefs, there should remain, as with Burzum, a distinction between a knowledge of the band's personal philosophies and any interpretation of how they may have directly affected their releases. Whether or not the band may be rightfully adjudged NS, there seems little basis for regarding ‘Battlefields’ as demonstrably so. There are no printed lyrics, or translations of lyrics, and the brutally guttural vocals render any meaning resolutely impenetrable.

‘Glare Over Slavonic Lands’, in the album’s concluding couplet, is the most overt declaration made but this would seem to be more a statement of nationalism that is entirely befitting to the overall concept, as Ukrainian heritage is fundamental to ‘Battlefields’, from the traditional folk music to the portraits of late-mediaeval Ukrainian worthies adorning the sleevenotes. Down the centuries, Ukraine is a nation that has been fought over relentlessly and this fact provides a depth of emotional underpinning to Hate Forest creating an album about war, and also provides a context for their defence of the Slav identity in such a track title that may be less excusable in less oppressed nations. Ultimately, it is the epic, proud music alone that speaks volumes for Hate Forest.

The solitary female singer who opens the final couplet provides a subdued and mournful introduction to Hate Forest’s last track, where the now familiar slow riff, metallic drum and majestic choral accompaniment have an extra emphasis and deliberation, a foreboding of finality. The vocals are even lower in the mix than hitherto, echoed and distorted. Finally, the track provides a solo, or at least a fantastically minimalist Hate Forest version of one: a simple, repetitive riff, far higher in tone than anything else on the album, that provides its own keening, prior to the genuine article to follow. The effect is powerfully stark and slightly unsettling, as the riff varies only in its tone and is deliberately not quite on the rhythm of the track beneath, emphasising its fragile threnody. The main slow riff then returns and the track follows the pattern so carefully established across the whole of ‘Battlefields’ of change (riff, tempo) within repetition (slow/fast, slow/fast) before the standout solo riff returns to close the track, slower and more purposeful than before, still providing its off-kilter lament before the track is brutally cut off, like the lives of the warriors on the battlefield, as the guitar starts to feedback.

The uncontrollable feedback of this last lone guitar prefigures the uncontrollable emotion of the women on ‘Keening’, where the previous beauty of their singing is now replaced by wailing, and any attempts at song to codify their grief are ultimately overwhelmed by plain tears.

The downbeat ending to ‘Battlefields’ is entirely fitting and is indicative of a band from a country where defeat and loss of life have been all too real in both the distant and recent past. Black metal often regards war as a subject for exultant glorification and the celebration of a supposedly inevitable triumph. Hate Forest are intelligent enough to recognise the human cost that accompanies battle and afford it due emphasis and reflection. The close of the album is as perfectly judged as what has come before; indeed, the only false note on ‘Battlefields’ comes at the end of ‘With Fire and Iron’, where the track fades back in with its riff played on a reversed tape, a gimmicky bit of studio manipulation that doesn’t sit well with Hate Forest’s grim integrity and serves no thematic purpose. It’s a solitary distracting misjudgement on this otherwise exemplary album.

By all accounts, ‘Battlefields’ had to be entirely rerecorded after the initial master tapes were wiped owing to hardware problems in the studio. What the original version would have sounded like can, therefore, only be a matter of speculation but it is hard to believe it could have matched the masterpiece that resulted from the band having to start over again, their own victory from the jaws of defeat. Supernal Records have enhanced the overall effect with an obscure but effectively muted presentation, entirely black and white, with woodcuts of anonymous battle scenes and washed-out backgrounds of weaponry alongside the simple portraits of ancient warlords.

For their subsequent final album, as in the preceding ones, Hate Forest returned to their faster, thrashier style (possibly because the slower, epic side to their creativity was by then being fully explored by their releases as Drudkh), which means that ‘Battlefields’, in many ways, stands apart amidst their albums, like the lone runic megalith adorning its cover. In its intelligent appraisal of war, its ambitious encompassing of Ukraine’s musical past and, above all, for the grim power of its doom-laden envisioning of black metal, ‘Battlefields’ stands as a monument any band would be proud of.

Hate Forest are one of the most powerful bands I have ever heard. I've heard some other Hate Forest albums where they do play a completely "Raw black metal with ambient elements"-like black metal, but this album is completely different and sheerly much, much more original than any of the former raw-er black metal releases from this band. And this time; different is for the better. This album is a stunning masterpiece of blackened doom metal, especially with the essence of the concept: war, endless damnation, battlefields. Each song really relates to the concept of the album, which is a really nice thing that most bands today can't manage to demonstrate through musical castings. Just like in movies, wherein armies approach each other and godless, savagely-demanding yet slow sad music is played. Hate Forest start out each song with many depressive chords in a very silent manour. When the time is right (usually within a minute or two of sad, atmospheric chords with the settlement of tone) the tone is settled in. Hate Forest know just exactly what to do next. They stop everything with a powerful, grouchy chord. If you were still trying to imagine what scene they're trying to induct at this point, it would be the staredown between the two armies. Absolutely breathtaking methods of perspiration and settlement & progression of tone. After this sequence, the armies attack eachother. This is when some nice catchy riffs with powerfully awesome drumming sequences emerge into the aural holocaust committed. The vocals come in now, but not harsh (normal black metal) vocals. The vocals on this album are extremely provocative and just all-out...scary gutteral vocals. They sound like a behemoth monster howling its last breath. Some of the best overall metal vocals I have ever heard.

The other cool thing about this album is that every odd song (1, 3, 5, 7) are traditional Ukranian folklore songs. Hate Forest didn't write these songs (as the back of the CD addresses, they were taken from an ancient Ukranian vocal suite) but they fit in with the album just perfectly. The first one settles in the tone of the album, with a woman singing in a very sad tone as if her city were about to be attacked. This only lasts for about a minute or two, and then out of nowhere, the army emerges. Track two continues through some progressively sad, powerful electric guitar chords with a light drumming cymbal sequence in the background. It emerges into some catchy riffs, but remains slow and depressive. This is where the army attacks the poor woman's city. Everything dies as the drums help everything progress into all-out raw yet still slow and depressive suicidal part. The drums continue with an averagely fast bass drumming blast while the vocals emerge as the riffs change. Jesus, these vocals are all out spine-shivering. Not the monster-like vocals as I previously addressed, but some really nice blending harsh vocals which have that really nice echoey affect. Later, the gutteral vocals come in at the same time as the harsh vocals. It sounds like two commanders, one gigantically strong and huge, and the other one smaller, yet smarter. This song ends with a really powerful chord. This is where the town is pictured in flames, nothing spared.

The next track is another traditional Ukranian folk song. It also sets in a sad atmosphere, perhaps indicating a woman who escaped the town with her child or such and are now wandering the valleys alone. It really sounds like the woman and her child are walking and singing while weeping due to the death of all of their families and neighbors. Que the fourth track. This track was much more ambient, with some occasional vocals and average black metal riffs emerging. It certainly is a little too long and drags on a bit, but nothing to cry over. The fifth track comes in with an old woman singing. This one really made me picture other cities that have had havoc pertained amongst from the army that of which slaughtered it and its people. The sixth track says it all just in its name. "Glare Over Slavonic Lands". It really made me picture some holocaust survivors traveling back to their town - looking over a hill and seeing their whole city in flames with nothing left except ruins and fire. It begins with some very slow melodic riffs played on lead guitar, and progresses into a little doom/black metal style with some nice riffs emerging. The seventh and last track is the reconciliation. You can literally hear many women walking and crying as they sing some depressive parts. Really convincingly appropriate, as it fits right in to the tender atmospheric tone that the whole album previously portrayed. An excellent way to end the album, seeing that the average person only remembers the first and last parts of what they hear, this certainly sets in the tone of an amazingly depressive atmosphere. Geniunely satisfying.


Now call me crazy for picturing what I just stated in the last paragraphs, but I believe that is what one should do with atmospheric masterpieces such as this one. The music was made with much dynamical contrast and progression with deep atmosphere without hesitation - therefore was probably made to induct said atmosphere. I'm just saying what I felt it made me feel, which could very well address you, or could not. We all have our opinions.

Hate Forest literally wrote only three of the songs on this album, but each one is at least ten minutes long and really much nicer than any other doom/black metal band I've heard so far. Although they only have three original songs on this album (out of seven, which is less than half) the other songs that they picked couldn't have been nicer and could not have fit in with the album any better at all, whatsoever, no questions asked. This is one of the most powerful and storytellingly acurate releases every released. An outstanding effort and certainly worth a listen.