Primordial
MOONSORROW/DER WEG EINER FREIHEIT ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL, LONDON
IRELAND’S VAGABOND HEROES UNITE THE HEATHEN HORDES
THE OPULENT SURROUNDINGS of the Islington Assembly Hall seem an odd choice to host a tour dubbed the ‘Heathen Crusade’, but the BM renegades storming into the UK under that banner are more determined to raise your consciousness than lay waste to all around them. That’s not to say that DER WEG EINER FREIHEIT [7] are anything but a sense-obliterating experience. Unspectacularly attired, the German four-piece mine a propulsive seam that teeters on post-BM territories without losing their primal essence. Wide in scope, tracks like Requiem ride tides of blastbeats as charged and churned riffs engulf you as if you’re staring at the sun, but they feel like undergoing a rite of purification, both a solemn requiem and the beginning of a transformation into something spectacularly new. If there’s any fault, it’s that they rely on a similar set of dynamics throughout their set, but a closing Aufbruch becomes an incendiary, Icarusflight storming of the heavens, riffs daring themselves to overload as they reach a state of ravaged glory. Helsinki’s tribal-striped, keyboard-bourne MOONSORROW
[8] tread their own fine line these days, their sense of the epic now straddling the fevered pagan black metal of yore and a more showy sensibility whose ambition is split equally between greater accessibility and an expansiveness that shares a few trade routes with Enslaved. Even if their stage presence can border on the cheesy, at their root these songs are still infused with a heartfelt and potent resonance, balancing the sweeping folk pomp of Kivenkantaja with windblown odysseys such as Kuolleiden Maa, elevated into heroic realms.
Both the most serious of endeavours and anthemhurling festival rabble-rousers, PRIMORDIAL’S [9] muse remains beholden to no one, their latest album, Exile Amongst The Ruins a weatherbeaten treatise on the state of the world, and all its historical echoes, that takes time to bed in. If there was any doubt about how it will translate live, it’s immediately beaten back with the opening Nail Their Tongues, its grimly insistent groove urged onwards with all their typical, earthy heft as it ultimately becomes another rousing addition to their arsenal. Alan Averill, a rag-draped peasant prophet, is a fearsomely charismatic focal point, his voice a stormfront of grief and resilience, embodied with dramatic abandon. To Hell Or The Hangman’s riffs churn and boil over into a sublime, post-punk-infused charge, while the rolling surge of As Rome Burns and a closing Empire Falls summon up a cathartic whorl of sound that binds a rapt crowd into a fever pitch of elation.