If you’re fed up with mainstream Metal and you’re looking for something raw and underground sounding as if it’s been recorded in someone’s shed, you could do worse than check this out. It’s a split album from Germany’s Heimdahls Wacht and Winterlieke and the Dutch band Heervader.
The grey and bleak cover of this album led me to believe that I might be listening to outpourings of raw Black Metal. This is partly true, but the first track, “Threnos (Urstrung Teil II)”, by Heimdahls Wacht, starts out as a soft, atmospheric acoustic song. I seem to recall hearing something like this once by Blind Guardian. The song is sung in German and seems to be about the melancholy caused by being taken away from home and the natural and symbolic power of the wind in this process. “Jeder Abschied atmet den Tod” – “Every goodbye breathes death”. Not a happy tale, then. The singer of Heimdahls Wacht sounds similar to his counterpart in Subway for Sally, for whom singing in German works well, but not here. It’s too slow. Then, half way into this 13 minute track, it inexplicably bursts into seething Black Metal with the blazing sound of early Burzum and vocals from any early Mayhem track of your choice, not to mention the moaning to be found on “Fall of Seraphs”. Then it fades out in long-winded fashion. The latter half doesn’t change so much lyrically, other than the fact it seems to go into dialect, presumably Westphalian as that’s where they’re from, but why there was a need for such a violent change of musical style is a mystery. The good thing is that it’s played well.
If I didn’t really know what the first track was about, the second “Nebelkrähen” by Winterlieke was much more clear cut. It is simply ice-cold and bleak Black Metal. The vocalist’s grim screams echo in the freezing wind. The riff is raw, simple and majestic. Drums bang funereally and ominously. There’s nothing here that the Black Metal devotee won’t have heard before but it’s still excellent and makes its point.
“Berserkgangr” and “Vorwaarts!” by Heervader are pieces of old style Viking Folk Metal. I guess Bathory and once again Burzum would be points of reference. The two tracks go through all the necessary scenarios and images – warriors sitting round burning fires in forests, melancholy, some fairly serious hey nonny nonny, acoustic folk and in particular strident and harsh Black Metal guitars – but it didn’t have overwhelming passion or originality and wasn’t very inspiring.
I think it’s great that a label releases this sort of split album. It’s certainly “back to basics” so some degradation has to be expected, particularly in terms of sound, but at the same time it’s not without quality. For me though it was Winterlieke who won the “Battle of the Bands”.
http://www.heimdahlswacht.de
http://www.det-germanske-folket.com
