URD

Aside from a few thunderous outbursts of blast beats, Urd is an album which showcases Borknagar's utter transformation from their black metal roots. If releases such as The Olden Domain offered a more black metal-leaning precedent for releases such as The Sham Mirrors by Arcturus, here the impression given is of a taken on that sound with the prog elements emphasised and the black metal almost entirely drained away. Clean vocals are for the most part the order of the day (with ICS Vortex returning to the fold full time), as are sweeping keyboard passages courtesy of Lazare.

Some listeners may find that Borknagar's stylistic pendulum has swung a little too far in a prog direction by this point, though the trend has really persisted for several albums and if you've been listening to their material in chronological order and are still on the bandwagon by this point you'll probably find it reasonably satisfying. At the same time, Borknagar don't seem to have made much of a substantial musical advance over the sort of material they have produced on previous albums or which their members have produced on other projects, and numerous other progressive and avant-garde black metal acts have produced substantially more groundbreaking work of late, and Urd doesn't quite put Borknagar back at the head of the pack.

I confess that I'm not a fan of Borknager or of black metal. I was intrigued by a recent review of this album that claimed that this band has been getting more and more melodic and less black metal. I will admit, though, that I enjoyed Borknager's older album "Empiricism", as it contained wonderful folksy melodies and much creativity.

So, I listened to this new album, and I came away unimpressed. Maybe a dozen or more listens would allow this to grow sufficiently, but I don't think I can bring myself to do that. This band is certainly more melodic, but that doesn't stop them from the overuse of the bass pedal or the "white noise" effect of the rhythm guitars. I hate those things. They have also omitted the folksy melodies, and replaced them with, well, nothing. Maybe some vocals harmonies that aren't that impressive? They have also taken away the rather intelligent lyrics, as far as I can tell (it can be hard to decipher them, obviously). So, all points of interest for me are now gone.

What we have, then, is a constant storm of double bass (with no variation at all), a blurriness from the guitars, and some okay vocals. Everything else is lost. On top of that, there is little variation between tracks, so the album itself becomes a blur, too. I'm sure fans of Enslaved and Ne Obliviscaris will love this, but I'm don't.