I popped
Necrophobic's
Hrimthursum into the stereo and was immediately taken by the intro. It's majestic and powerful and sets the mood for METAL. It really is one of the best intros I've heard in a while as I find most pointless. Then at the first listen, track one let me down just a bit. I thought the guitar sound could have been a lot heavier. There was just something about the record that made me think they could have done things differently, creating a heavier record overall, but I soon got over it and realized I was wrong.
One of things about
Hrimthursum that makes it great is the fact that nothing is overdone. Nothing is too over the top. It is a bunch of killer songs that are also arranged in an order that gave the record a cool feel to it. It seems very well thought out and put together. Being a guitarist myself, I have a tendency to over-analyze things and look at music in a sense of how difficult it is to play. The song "I Strike With Wrath" has what guitar players usually refer to as the AC/DC or Iron Maiden bounce-the-notes-off-the-high-E-string riff. Almost anyone who can play guitar at all could easily play it, but it really ads a lot of feeling to the song. The riffs have some mildly technical parts, but again it's all very basic. Don't think that takes away from it; this is one hell of a record.
Surprisingly, the vocals hack into the mix, and you can actually understand a lot of the lyrics. Song topics are typical for the black/death genres, but I found the cheese factor to be minimal. The levels of all the instruments really were put together brilliantly on this disc. It doesn’t sound over processed and that only helps you get into Necrophobic's music. The underground used to be dominated by old school production, and since every other band has an engineer capable of recording from their garage on equipment that is quite high tech, way too many records have come out that sound too digitized. Metal isn't supposed to be that way. This record is clean, but it still has balls. I would guess Necrophobic had a decent budget for recording
Hrimthursum and thankfully they didn't go overboard on the production.
The drums are also arranged perfectly. There are many tempos, but nothing gets lost in the speed of it all. It's never so fast that you're distracted by the impressive speed many modern drummers possess. That aspect of metal in general really damaged the genre as drummers were suddenly looked at as not much more than speed freaks who would try to be as over the top fast with blasting and double bass to the point where that's all people would speak of. I love speed, but what about the fucking guitar riffs? Guitars create songs, drums keep the beat... and Necrophobic created an awesome disc, as
Hrimthursum is very much so worth a listen. Chances are it won’t soon leave your CD player as it's a quality release that's down right addicting.