Shores In Flames

My first foray into black metal. I suppose I should've started at the beginning with Venom, but my Nordic blood could no longer resist the thunderous call of viking metal, a subgenre crystallized by Swedish lo-fi metal legend Bathory on Hammerheart (1990). Now unlike the tongue-in-cheek goofballery of Scottish pirate metal (a recent and hopefully short-lived phenomenon) these Swedes mean serious business.

There is good reason not to snicker at all the hollering about longships and invocations of Odin. The subject at hand is not Middle Earth hokum but the rape of Scandinavia's pre-Christian heritage by the Holy Roman Empire. The dominant theme of the album is the loss of a proud culture of heroes to a creeping cult of weakness. A minor revolution of anti-Christian sentiment started here, leading to the burning of over 50 churches in Norway throughout the nineties. Quite...unfortunate.

Despite my affinity for the rawest garagiest production values I'm a sucker for a concept album, and production value should be equal to the concept. With Hammerheart I think they spent millions getting the drums to sound like Asgard in your stereo and layering on the voices of actual valkyries making love to your ears. Then they threw the tapes into a fjord for a thousand years until they one day washed up on shore. The result sounds like an ancient artifact, remembered glory echoing out of the past. The vocals are not of the modern world. Bathory mastermind Quorthon looses a primeval croak such as might have been heard had Gollum conquered Mordor.