Immortal - Battles in the North (Black Metal)

With a membership experienced in peddling vapidity (Hypocrisy and Gorgoroth), Immortal knows exactly how to unleash constant barrages of over sampled/triggered blast beats, generic tremolo riffs, and "2Xtreeem" deathcore vocals yet still put you to sleep. Battles in the North is more of that Marduk-core you hear when deafkore fans discover Burzum on YouTube and decide to make an "2Xtreeeeeeem" version whose goal is to be "trve kvlt" and "br00dle".

With a bio that claims the band came together through "sharing a vast affinity for evil winters and alcohol", it's obvious Immortal are about posing first, and music second. Considering one band member (Abbath) ended up banging and marrying the sister of another (Demonaz), I already knew this album Battles in the North was a disaster of incest metal failure.

This generic and crappy Marduk-core reinforces my aversion toward bands whose lyrics involve "grimness" or "winterdemons [sic]". You get the pseudo-atmospheric, sped up and dumbed down Burzum riffs that mall music heroes Behemoth and Satyricon are known for churning out, but then you get the cheesy "melodic elements". These sound like tremolo-picked metalcore melodies of The Black Dahlia Murder variety thrown in between generic low-fi Norsecore "daabrbrbrbrbr jijijiji chachacha" riffs for "dynamics", and the best that can be said is that they're really distracting. Going from incongruous blasting to stadium rock riffs disguised through tremolo picking can get real annoying real fast.

Tracks are indistinguishable and blur into each other in a mess of sped up Burzum riffs and triggered blast beats. A typical song on this album will start with a heavy metal intro riff, but a lack of focus soon sets in as what sounds like ideas from 3 different projects - black metal, heavy metal and metalcore - fight each other for space in tracks where the only cohesion to be found is through the incessant blasting of drums to keep things "2Xtreeem". Riffs are indistinguishable from one another, and incoherently arranged in the modern metalcore style of sandwiching disparate ideas in between tremolo-picked scale chug afterthoughts.

Nothing about this release or band stands out. I see what Immortal trying to do (constant blasting music like Marduk) but then uncertainty, in the form of random cheesy tremolo-picked metalcore melodies, kicks in. This, in conjunction with the retarded album cover, deafkore member affiliations (Hypocrisy and Gorgoroth are not black metal), and incestuous band history paints a picture of a band who shat their way into making a "blast beats 101 for dummies" album in hopes of being taken seriously by the "evil muzak" black metal scene.

This band is talented to a certain degree at making generic Marduk music, before it devolves into mallcore cheese, so if I can offer any advice to them it would be to dump certain members (Demonaz), stop having a retard ghost write lyrics about "wintercold-is-cold", remove or come up with real melodies (not lelelelele generic metalcore ones) and to spend more time writing and structuring riffs so that their next album doesn't sound like the same track repeated ten times.

I would recommend Immortal change their band name, and Abbath and Demonaz come up with other monikers as well to avoid the embarrassment of having released this failure. Avoid Battles in the North like the AIDS-ridden product of incest that it is.

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