Free Norse, no horse

I've been focusing on old stuff, but here's a look at some some brand new slabs of honky abrasion, all of which are available for free streaming in their entirety on mp3.com (click the link on each album name for the listening page). And here I thought that site had gone completely down the tubes! I cannot comment on the production too well with these because of the stream quality, but this review binge is an experiment. What the hey.

Ihsahn - The Adversary: Emperor were the Beatles of Norwegian black metal. Starting in their youth by emulating their favorite rockers, they expanded on that base and defined new boundaries for composition, arrangement, even fashion within their chosen style. With every album, they managed to create a new era, a new subgenre, a new legion of copycats. Of the core songwriters, Samoth was the John Lennon of the group - the rebellious, rowdy idealogue - while Ihsahn was the Paul McCartney - the conceptual, nerdy fop. This guy's my least favorite Beatle, but my favorite founding member of Emperor, so go figure. Anyway, now Ihsahn's forsaking bandmates and putting out an album on his own, right after Emperor started doing reunion shows and his family band Peccatum called it quits. I'm with the majority on this one: I fucking loved Emperor like nobody's business, from demos to break-up. Peccatum was often a bit of a horse pill, although I can understand Ihsahn's allegiance: Heidi S. Tveitan is a gorgeous Norsewoman, and I'd want to hang out with her all the time and take pretentious press photos if I was married to her, too. Yet while the loving couple's impressively decorated chamber metal project had its occasional highbrow charms, it frequently bogged down under the eclectic approach. Turns out The Adversary sounds exactly like I thought it would - like Prometheus: The Discipline of Fire and Demise mixed with a fair amount of Lost In Reverie, his last albums with his most long-term bands, the former of which might as well have been a solo joint with Samoth and Trym as session players. The only other guy playing on The Adversary is techmaster drummer Asgeir Mickelson (Borknagar/Spiral Architect/Lunaris/etc.), although "Homecoming" sounds like it's sung by Kristoffer G. Rygg, who of course is the fucking man and deserves his own solo album. It's mostly a fussy labyrinth of teched-out symphonic black/death/whatever metal, but it's prone to eerily romantic, avant-garde darkwave trances (not that either album didn't dip into the other's style on occasion). There's something slightly disappointing about predicting the likely move of a guy who I respect for his progression, although it doesn't make for a bad set of songs at all. In fact, it's just as emotional and intelligent as I would want, and synthesizes all a fan's favorite Ihsahn-isms while managing to branch out further into pure prog metal territory. Dropping sweeping orchestral moves in the dark of a lurching rhythm, opener "Invocation" is reminiscent of the way "Curse You All Men!" launches IX Equilibium straight into your goddamned face, but with a very pretty clean section in the middle, something like Opeth would do but with synth strings and Ihsahn multitracking his ever-sincere vocals. He experiments with choral vocals a lot on this disc, and it works as part of the man's repertoire of growl, croon and wail. "Called By the Fire" is very different - a very simple metal riffer at first, then it gets on with the dissonant trickiness, mostly staying at ballad speed and sporting a vaguely pop feature in a recurring chorus. It goes on among those moods, and the flow is much smoother than, for instance, the first two Peccatum albums. Since there's still too much to take in here even after a few listens, I'm stopping before this gets any longer. I can't wait to get the album, soak in the lyrics and quiver before the malevolent blast of "And He Shall Walk In Empty Places" with its proper sound quality. Candlelight Records' American arm made a cheesy TV commercial for this album, which also kindly reminded me to pick up the new Daylight Dies. Ihsahn is certainly not kvlt, but still emong the Elite.
NEGATIVITY: -2.5 (Ihsahn ain't as pissed as he used to be)

Ministry - Rio Grande Blood: Every time Ministry puts out a new album, there's all this hype about it being a "return" to the Psalm 69 days, and it's always just hype. See, I would prefer a return to the sound of The Mind Is A Terrible Thing to Taste, which pretty much changed my life at age 13, but I like the mecha-thrash assault of Psalm 69 a lot, too. Al Jourgensen has never put out a record that's totally unlistenable, but ever since the heroin-sludged Filth Pig, an undervalued, doomy wreck of a record, it hasn't been the same. But it's gradually gotten better over the last few albums, even after co-founding bassist Paul Barker finally threw in the towel before Houses of the Molé. The only problem has been that while Jourgensen jacked up the tempos and started bashing the Bushes again, it was more a return to type than a return to form. Even when they were hammering away in jackhammer fury, there was something cold and fakey about the last two Ministry discs, as if Al was trying too hard to go back to playing music he didn't really like anymore. My new mantra is, "I'm tired of being let down," so I didn't rush out for this (and I still haven't heard the new Revolting Cocks). But I'll be damned if that isn't one beaut of an album cover, and doubly so if this isn't the best Ministry release in fourteen years. Sure, that's what they all said after Animositisomina and Houses of the Molé. But I swear to you, this is not the haze of nostalgia filling in the gaps. It doesn't hurt that Jourgensen's cohorts on this include a pair of guys who did time in Prong, Tommy Victor (Danzig's current guitarist) and Paul Raven (of Killing Joke fame), who also know their way around effective industrial pummel. The title track and "Señor Peligro" simply rocket out of the gate with frenzied thrash riffs and cacophanous clanking, the former boasting samples of the Prez manipulated so he's saying things like "I have adopted sophisticated terrorist tactics" and "I am a weapon of mass destruction." Granted, these days people are criticizing Bush and Rumsfeld to their ugly faces on national television and it doesn't seem to make a difference. So, it can be argued that Ministry's actually making as much of a dent as a sonically safer act like Green Day or whoever the mainstream is hailing as some daring voice of dissent, especially considering Ministry's brand of protest rock has always been more about gallows-black sarcasm than philanthropic hand-wringing. Speaking of sarcasm, my man Jello Biafra, Jourgensen's Lard cohort, makes an appearance as a carnival barker on "Ass Clown," delivering zingers like "See the Department of Homeland Security perfecting new ways of drowning black people!" Other tracks like "Fear (Is Big Business)" and "The Great Satan" (beginning with a cute sample of my girl Condi) are the kind of vein-popping barnburners that would be highlights on any Ministry disc from the past decade, but here are just another part of the consistently aggressive fabric. Also worth mentioning is "Khyber Pass," a strong album-ending slow burn in the classic Ministry tradition with Middle Eastern vocals by trip-hop singer Liz Constantine. Rio Grande Blood is further proof that when Republicans become detrimental to American life, they're a boon to dissident American metal. Comeback of the year.
NEGATIVITY: -3.5 (still miss Hermes Pan, but glad Hypo Luxa quit horsing around)

Enslaved - Ruun: Released in the US of A on May 2, which means I have been fiending to buy this for over a week. I am so inert these days I can't even go buy the new album by one of my current major favorites. I will remedy that soon, since I have a lot of driving ahead of me this weekend. First off, that cover looks kind of, um... feminine? Perhaps it's just an armpit or something, but considering Ruun is probably the most accessible set of songs the Viking lords have done yet, I can see all the haters from the old school lining up to mock Grutle's and Ivar's masculinity. Well, fuck those greasy dweebs and their fearsome Grand Belial's Key 7" collections. Like their onetime split-mates Emperor, Enslaved has never made two identically-styled albums, preferring to do something different with the core sound of each successive set, giving each its own flavor and character. As with all the truly great metal bands today, they have channeled diverse influences - some necessarily outside of the "proper" metal realm - and honed their own understanding of music as a tool of expression, ultimately creating a unique and personal fusion of styles and moods. At one time long ago, I thought Amorphis would have made a really awesome move if they turned into the world's first prog/dark metal/jam band hybrid, but their instincts remained confined to brevity and choruses. Enslaved, on the other hand, could really just ride some of their riffs foreeeever, and it would sound absolutely bongtastic. Sadly, they haven't done a sixteen-minute song since 1997, and there's nothing over seven minutes here. Ruun sands off the rough edges from the barren alien soundscapes of 2004's Isa, even wading in on a wave of haunting mellotron like Isa's godly pedecessor Below the Lights. I said I wouldn't comment on production, but even through the inferior internet feed I can tell Enslaved went for the clean, dry production found on those last couple of discs. It fits the starker material, which naturally retains the franchise's enigmatic, surly and majestic pagan nature. When it's rocking, it's rarely blasting, rather rocking in a meaty manner like recent Satyricon, but not as numbingly caveman-simple. When the atmospheric elements (atonal riffs, post-rock reverb, '70s keyboards, acoustic strumming) creep in, they do so fluidly and naturally. When it's mellow, the delicate aura freezes you inside its gossamer chill. Behold the mighty title track, an intoxicating bit of dismal majesty that's like stumbling upon a Katatonia/Floyd/Isis jam session. Other tracks like "Fusion of Sense and Earth" and "Tides of Chaos" have a trace of the Voivod-gone-doom stench of Monumension, the band's most psycho-delic set to date. But overall, this is a tidier band than ever before, and in an era when an excellent band like Opeth is so beloved in America they're considered a sell-out act, 2006's version of Enslaved could possibly grab a piece of the larger audience they've deserved for so long, especially with all the big reviewers slobbering over Ruun. "Path To Vanir" is an odd choice for a first single/video, striding all over the Enslaved map from Viking lope to doom crawl, from midpaced guitar heroics to madman thrash to blissful fragility. I think the planned second single, "Essence" (bootleg footage from their March hometown show in Bergen here!), will go over better - like "Where the Slime Live" or "The Grand Conjuration", it spotlights an essentially underground band's most populist points while capturing enough of their idiosyncratic "magic" to serve as a viable showcase of their talent. I would crap several rocking horses if Opeth brought Enslaved over as openers. A tour like that might be enough to get me to ingest something illegal.
NEGATIVITY: -2 (introspective, elemental, esoteric)