BLODHEMN

Bloodhemn is the fourth studio album from Norwegian black/ viking metal band Enslaved. This album is the last in a series of what can be considered the early albums from Enslaved. After this album Enlaved would change their style toward a more experimental extreme metal approach.

The music on Bloodhemn is in many ways similar to the style Enslaved played on their previous album Eld. Generally fast paced black metal with viking lyrics. The songs are better composed and much more powerful than the ones on Eld though. This is not technical music but the impact is powerful, raw and even majestic at times. The vocals are both black metal rasps and clean monotenous vocals.

Standout tracks would be the memorable and powerful I Lenker Til Ragnarok, Ansuz Astral ( Note the grand ending to the song) and the last song Sutungs Mjød/ Perkulator which is a bit different from the rest of the songs. It´s much slower and solely features clean singing. There is also a folky ethnic touch to that song.

The musicianship is very strong at this point. Dirge Rep on drums is a fast and tight drummer while Ivar Bjørnson´s grand and brutal guitar riffing is also a great feature. Grutle´s harsh black metal screaming is an aquired taste but personally I like it.

The production is really sharp yet still raw and brutal.

Bloodhemn still doesn´t reveal many progressive tendencies in Enslaved´s music and it´s essentially a black metal album that should hold little or no interest to prog heads. To those of us who in addition to being prog heads also enjoy extreme metal this is a great album though and it fully deserves 3 stars. I will still recommend that you listen to either Isa or RUUN before anything else from Enslaved even though Bloodhemn is definitely worth a listen.