I must say I was quite surprised to see that this album had been re-issued by Metal Blade. To me, they just didn’t seem like the sort of label that would want a relatively underground black metal band that featured 2 members of t
Originally released in 2007 by German label Northern Silence Productions, this went very much under my radar, so it’s fantastic that it will now be bought to the attention of a lot more people via Metal Blade. Throughout the album the band give huge nods to various different Scandinavian black metal legends (Valkyrja themselves are Swedish). Most of the time, they tend to have a war-hardened Marduk-like edge, though they do like to kick in a little of the Naglfar styled melodic sections every now and then to keep the album far from becoming a crushing blast-a-thon like ‘Panzer Division Marduk’ (for the record, I fucking love ‘Panzer Division Marduk’, so by no means was that comment meant as an insult). The track ‘The Vigil’ falls completely into the slower, creeping style that the band tend to favour less than the speedier, pedal to the metal blasting sections. This works well enough for it not to stand out like a sore thumb from the rest of the album, giving a small amount of respite from the albums generally high pace.
The melody is present throughout, but thankfully never becomes too sickly or widdly thanks to the overall crushing tone that that album sets. There’s a hell of a lot of blastbeats and howling vocalwork to keep even the most uber-kvlt of black metal fans happy here, rest assured.
As a whole, I was taken completely by surprise by this album’s fantastic quality. All being well this will do well for Metal Blade, so they’re encouraged to dig deeper into the underground so as to pick up some other uncovered gems in the future.
http://www.myspace.com/valkyrjaswe
http://www.metalblade.com/
