It makes perfect sense that Fallen Empire has something to do with this album. This Icelandic metal machine throws everything they have at you with hellish intensity. Grim Kim Kelly picked this as one of her top albums of the year and while I normally respect her taste she also listed that god awful Cloud Rat album as being one of her top picks so I am no longer sure about her. The second song on this album is darker and more cavernous in its cacophony of carnage. They grow more discordant and roaring with something eerie going on within the layers of tormented murk. The fourth songs is really just a noise interlude. The next actual song has a Burzum like rumble to it. This Varg influenced sonic drone goes in a slower more gloomy direction with the double bass picking up under neath it. They begin to become unhinged and allow the song to swell back up into blast beats.
They eventually gather up into a gallop and engage in a very rough hewn version of viking metal. This transitions into one of the albums heaviest song which drapes the blast beats in dissonance before racing off into a thrash like tremolo stream. This gives the song a very dark ebb and flow. The drums drop down into a more tribal pound before hammering down the double bass again. This is more of a death metal moment, but the droning sonics of it all keep it rooted in black metal. This is the album most intense moments and one of the sonically heaviest moments of any album you would have heard this year.
The album ends with a brief atmospheric outro, that is more noise than not. Overall these guys nail the unholy grail of being just as heavy sonically as they are metal, though the do churn out some of the things you expect from black metal, but manage to make many of them sound darker. I can see from a production stand point how some one might mistake this for death metal since it is so bellowing , but more introspective in its aggression and offering different shades of dissonance to paint the blackness with. I'll give this a 9.5
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