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\nSo, there I was, walking around in the woods, minding my steps because a fall would be a disaster for my shoulder, listening to these gigantic Viking metal tunes, originally conceived by a genre-defining musician when I was a much younger person, now conveyed to us by a band who have decided to lift the heritage of\u00a0said musician.<\/p>\n
What was it, exactly, that made Tomas Forsberg, better known in metaldom as Quorthon, something special? Was he an exceptional singer? No, not really. He sang and screamed with passion, yes, but technically he wasn’t great. Was he a sublime guitar player? Nah, he was certainly no Yngve Malmsteen. As a bassist he was also capable, but not world-class. He even used a drum machine for a big chunk of his recordings! Well, then, what was it?<\/p>\n
Like other musicians who eventually become beacons for others, those who define genres, Quorthon dared to be different. He dared to alter recipes and\u00a0find his own\u00a0vision for music as a way of expressing emotions.\u00a0From the feeble and raw beginnings, where Venom and Mot\u00f6rhead were\u00a0but all too clear inspirational sources, over\u00a0to ‘Blood Fire Death’ where the\u00a0vision would finally\u00a0take shape, and then unto the\u00a0power and might of\u00a0‘Hammerheart’ and ‘Twilight of the Gods’, where the soul of Quorthon’s vision for a truly Scandinavian brand of metal was\u00a0definitively\u00a0unleashed in a merger of\u00a0doomy bombast, passionate vocals about\u00a0life and death in the high North\u00a0as well as\u00a0beauty into a great, epic unity. That was, of course, combined with the fact that Quorthon was perceived as a bit of an eccentric character, but in fact I always imagined that he was basically an introvert profile who would eventually abandon live performances entirely because he felt mostly at ease recording in the studio and staying away from the hubbub of the music business.<\/p>\n
The two latter-mentioned albums together form the apex of Quorthon’s creative legacy,\u00a0since his later albums never quite captured both the grandeur and the\u00a0freshness of ‘Hammerheart’ and ‘Twilight…’. This is\u00a0not unusual\u00a0for bands and musicians.\u00a0There are peaks and downs and\u00a0peaks again. Who knows; if\u00a0heart failure hadn’t ripped Quorthon away from us in 2004, we could have been in\u00a0the middle of his comeback with a series of intense and relevant albums, just like we’ve seen it with so many other older bands.<\/p>\n
Anyway, speculations about a future that never was to be are futile, and we can just observe how\u00a0many black and Viking metal bands\u00a0would not have existed without\u00a0Bathory. If I were to point to any band who have earned themselves the right to\u00a0pick up the torch from Bathory and carry on the flame of those Northern fires, it would indeed be Ereb Altor.<\/p>\n
With a considerable number of releases now, the Swedish quartet have shown how to strike a balance of on the one hand paying perfect homage to Quorthon and on the other hand to create their own music. Apparently,\u00a0the time has now finally come for Ereb Altor to make an actual tribute\u00a0album\u00a0to the old master. Hence, this cover album, ‘Blot – Ilt – Taut’ (very cleverly entitled so: it means ‘Blood – Fire – Death’ in old Swedish).<\/p>\n
The general impression of the album is that it stays true to Bathory’s versions of the songs without being exact copies,\u00a0and at the same time, this is also an update, even fine tuning, of the material. I’d claim that it can only be so because Ereb Altor have been so close to the heart of the matter for so many years now. Again relying on my overactive imagination, I could picture this as Quorthon’s re-recordings with today’s technology to celebrate the 25th anniversary of ‘Twilight of the Gods’ or his 50th birthday or whatever.<\/p>\n
To be honest, the two songs The Return of Darkness and Evil and Woman of Dark Desires sound terrible in the original versions. Perhaps back then, I appreciated them, simply because they were noisy and raw and I wanted music to be extreme, but I never really liked them.\u00a0These are the most obvious examples of the fine tuning I talked about before. Ereb Altor have managed to take these songs and make them sound fresh and hard and…well, they finally sound as good as they deserve to sound!<\/p>\n
The other six songs of the album, the classics, the great, epic monoliths of doomy Viking metal, they have also received the\u00a0respectful treatment of Ereb Altor. Sharpened, cleaned up, altered slightly, but never too much. They still hold the fire and atmosphere\u00a0of the originals, but simply sound more up-to-date. I can’t see how anyone could have done a better job of paying the honours to Quorthon and Bathory.<\/p>\n
I’ll conclude this piece by thanking Ereb Altor for helping make my walks through the woods something special – tack s\u00e5 mycket – j\u00e4vla bra skiva!<\/p>\n