December 2019 Feature Release - The North Edition

The start of December sees us kicking off a new undertaking. We'll be nominating a monthly feature release for each clan & are asking you to rate, review & discuss it for no other reason than because we enjoy it. Ben & I will certainly be contributing & we look forward to hearing your thoughts too. 

This month's feature release for The North is 1991's sixth album from Swedish black metal legends Bathory entitled "Twilight Of The Gods". It's often overlooked in favour of Bathory's previous three classics but we feel it's worthy of a little more attention. We're interested to hear what you think of it so don't be shy.

Quorthorn, like Paul Chain (subject of December's featured release for The Fallen), was a metal visionary who's ambition sometimes over-stretched his technical abilities, particularly in the vocal department. This is probably the most ambitious of Bathory's albums, it's operatic title being  deliberately deployed to evoke the epic Wagnerian telling of the old Norse legends, being one of the earliest examples of what came to be known as Viking Metal. As Daniel pointed out when explaining his selection, this is often overlooked in favour of several of the earlier albums and, to be honest, I prefer the predecessors myself. This is still a great album and by most other bands would be considered one of their finest, but I find it a bit too OTT in places to be a true favourite.

I really thought that I'd enjoy this more than Hammerheart, but by listening to them both back to back they evened out for me. Cleaning up the production for the guitar tone and drums makes Twilight of the Gods sound infinitely better than Hammerheart, but it also makes it lose that dirty edge that Bathory's old production had which helped to sell the Viking theme. Twilight of the Gods sounds like it's telling the tales of Gods rather than the mere mortals present on Hammerheart. The dirty old production is replaced with full and clean sounding guitar tones and bass rhythms, distant but bombastic sounding drums, and folky but powerful acoustics, creating a more familiar atmosphere for me in terms of viking and folk metal. 

While I don't think it should be overlooked and it has its place in the classic Bathory discography, I think that it's definitely missing something compared to Hammerheart or Blood Fire Death. With the entire album being rather low tempo and plodding, it loses a bit of its luster after the first three or four songs. It's very well written and certainly epic, but Hammerheart and Bathory's other albums had more spice to them.