Ofermod : " Sol Nox"

The Swedish black metal horde is back after five years with a new full length. This time there is a bigger crisper  sound.
The only down side of this is with a more polished sound no matter how fast the blast they have lose a little of the raw fury. Things sound more streamlined to me, to the point the evil sound of previous albums has been dulled, no matter how many blast beats they try to throw in. The vocals also sound more like Watain to me. They are utter in a dry throaty bellow. Things like the group chanted vocals on the third song help it to stand out and give you more to sink your teeth into.The title track really gets blasty and finds them sticking closer to the more tried and true bandwagon of black metal. The croak of the vocals has a clearer hollowness to them that feels more spoken. This is an improvement because any shift that takes this kind of black metal away from what has already been done a thousand times over by a thousand other bands is what is needed to keep the genre thriving. The title track also finds the chanted break having more of a Behemoth like sound to it.

In some ways "Sun of Dead Seasons" confirms that there is a more ritualistic element to this album as it moves at the speed of it's chanted throb. The change of speed to important here as this albums needs as much dynamic variance as it can get.  The Watain factor is still in play, it's like they feel since they are from Sweden it's the torch they should carry. "El -ehra"  is at more of a thrashy tempo. Once again layers of chanted vocals abound.They keep up the brisk pace for "To Dare the Tower". It moves with a Dissection thrash speed. The song just blasts by you with lots of energy, but not a ton of songwriting to really give it any weight.  At the end of the day my biggest problem with this album could be negligible to some extent, as I want this album to have the same evil grit their last one did, instead I have something that has more polished production at the sake of mixing the evil out . So you might miss Watain and it's them a minute to put albums out so if you need something to hold you over til their next album then round this up past the 7.5 I am giving it.