RUUN

Impressive stuff. Most black metal is annoying to me, it's too nonstop, too much energy, too much lack of sensibility, too much aggression, too much Satan. Usually Viking metal is pretty annoying too, goofy instrumentation, power metal esque vocals and drumming, and so much corn I can make a profit off of it. Enslaved manages to combine raw black metal, and pagan viking metal into something uniquely progressive, and different.

The music is dynamic, well textured, and well produced, this isn't one of those super spiritual bands who don't believe in modern technology and only record using a cassette player, this band is legit, and the recording quality for Ruun is superb. The guitars add a nice contrast too each other as they play vibrato chords that harmonize with each other, or one guitar will be playing a riff while the other playing a countering one, either way, they do it well. Usually I need a pretty slow song in order to keep attention, but none of these song are slow the whole way through, all of them are pretty fast brutal, and heavy. The main vocals are my main grudge, they kind of sound like those troll things on lord of the rings, kind of in the higher range of screaming, but not like Agallochs, it actually sounds like the bad guy from some cartoon, so it's pretty corny. The clean vocals are awesome though, and the death vocals are incredibly deep and horrifying, completing most songs. One thing that should stick out to the everyday progger is that this group actually uses a mellotron on a couple of the songs, which also does a lot to fill in the gap of any song.

Anyways really good album, highly recommended to anyone into the whole prog metal scene, but thirst for some blackened extremeness, go with Enslaved's RUUN. BTW, best song on the album is the title song, everything about is is so dynamic, and powerful, especially the breakdown with the vocals! Just thought you should know... Four stars!