Their third record, "The Crusher", had the band experimenting with a more straight forward approach, but didn't tarnish what made the band great to begin with.
The first two were filled with fantastic stories and memorable melodies. That duality and competition between these two overarching forces in the songs is what makes this music viable: all of just one, or the other, would quickly turn unsavory.Īmon Amarth put out three solid albums. The grandeur and adrenaline of honor-based warfare, and the sorrowful scenes of tragedy, as if forever intertwined to form and lend a very lyrical meaning to the music.
It always felt like "Sorrow through the nine worlds", the band's debut title, was the perfect slogan for their music. The melodies seem to always offer that perfect marriage between the epic warlike dimension, and unadulterated, pure sorrow. So what about the music itself, in its guts ? It's might and fire on the heavier movements, and then it's the heart-wrenching sorrow that Swedish metal is so at ease with that leads the show.
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It's like being a guest invited at a dinner table with every course being outstanding cuisine, and just being fed exactly the right portion for each dish, from the entrée to the dessert, and not feeling replete at the end and with each concoction adding a worthy dynamic between them.Ī word on the production, which was paid close attention to: the guitars are perfectly detailed on the articulated faster picking action and wide on the power chords, the bass sounds deliciously full and aggressively present, the drums are tangible and the vocals feel at the heart of the mix without being protuberant over the rest. What's lovely about it is, because every song is so strongly distinct and the melodies so palpable, with every new track starting it feels like a whole new world is opening up to us as the listener. the album is far from standard linearity. The band makes it a point to endow every song with at least one signature stamp: the anthemic 'Death in Fire' has the tapping section, Track 2 has the tubular bells, the fantastical title-track has that four-stroke 'Ver-sus-the-world' tail to the chorus, Track 5 has that watery/chorus effect on the vocals ("Set me free"), 'Thousand years of oppression' shows off excellent maturity in the song structure with a rare spoken word sequence from vocalist Johan Hegg building into a climax, the unmistakable and rousing chorus on 'Bloodshed' or finally the absolutely sticky melody on that wistful last track. Not every moment over these forty-eight minutes is utter brilliance, but the distribution per song between the more standard verses and the more unique melodies, is just as judiciously balanced as everything else on here. It is all trimmed down to the very essential. Nothing on here, quite literally not one second of playtime, is superfluous or material gone self-indulgent and naively trying itself at experimental developments. Every song has that strong backbone of either a basic chord progression or more articulate riff sections, intuitively crafted and resonant with sheer efficiency, spotlighting the immediately recognizable melodies this album is brimming with.
It appears every single section here from song to song is ripely wrought, carefully thought out and meaningful pieces of melodic heavy music. The reality of it though, is as much as there's always an element of cheesiness in such artistic endeavors dealing with heroism, the music is simply some of the best from track one to the very last that one would find in that general area of melodic extreme metal, if we would just call it that for the sake of this review. those alone might put a potential listener off. The album title "versus the world" or the cover art, some Norse mythology type protagonist in a defiant posture amidst the flames. It would be tempting to dismiss this album as faux epic candy metal.
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