Artist: Rimfrost
Album: Veraldar Nagli
Type: Album
Label: Season of Mist

OK, stop sniggering. Let me get this out of the way first. No, Rimfrost isn’t a nasty condition you get when taking a poo in the open whilst holidaying in the Arctic. (Dammit Lars, you read my mind – LH) OK? Right. On with the review.

Swedes Rimfrost are a world apart from what I was expecting musically. Yes, they play black metal – but it’s far from the grimmest of the grim underground sky clawing 4-track necrohell that I was expecting from a band who started their careers off with No Colours records. No, in fact, Rimfrost are obviously quite the audiophiles when it comes to production for starters. A nice beefy guitar blast first meets my ears, and continues throughout the album – interspersing beautiful acoustic passages and crawling epic sections. Slower rhythmic black metal is Rimfrost’s forte, and they play it well. The members are obviously big fans of Immortal’s more recent material too, all you’d need is Abbath (or Popeye – either’d do) on vocals and the occasional reference to Blashyrkh and it would be Immortal (actually, maybe more Immortal Junior, or Immortal-lite – they’re not quite at the same level just yet). I don’t think there’s a bigger compliment I can pay Rimfrost to be honest, they make it so obvious what’s in their CD racks after all.

At times I even got to thinking that, if Amon Amarth dropped their Viking fixation and began to played black metal, they’d sound somewhat like this too. ‘Veraldar Nagli ‘ is packed with great rolling melodies, awesome production and a enviable ability to pen an incisive song that really manages to hold your attention hostage like the stony stare of Medusa. Good work guys!

http://www.myspace.com/rimfrostofficial

Lars Christiansen

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