Morbid Celestial Desecration

What Ι particularly like to Aasgard is that since their beginning as a band they're trying to create their own playing style of black metal. In this album they're really reaping the fruits of their efforts, offering the listener genuine and original material. And this is the true essence of black metal, trying to express, feelings and sounds unexplored.

Aasgard have imagination and creativity, and since they do not follow the classic sound of the Greek scene, they create something entirely their own, not only in composition but also in production. As far as I know by interviews, they made the production themselves in a home studio with very limited means. It seems that the more the difficulties and adversity, the more creative and honest the band is.

  This album proves that the music of Aasgard works best when the band turns to the epic style. Lyrically, they had always paid respect to ancient heathen religions, expressing simultaneously a huge hatred for monotheism. Now this belief is reflected perfectly in their music. Although their previous releases flirted with the epic / pagan sound, the evolution in this album is really remarkable. ''Morbid Celestial Desecration'' is a very dark and dismal, and in the same time epic album, with chaotic, shivering vocals and songs/ hymns like ''The Art of Paganism'', ''Procession of Lord Death'' and ''Frozen Wind Above the Tomb'', tracks which contain some of the best riffs the band has ever written. The title track is also another quite original surprise, since an orthodox christian chanting, is turned into a strange and blasphemous opus.

The album is enriched with slow parts and clean guitars, additions which enhance the overall dark atmosphere. All the tracks create dark soundscapes and a sense of nostalgia for ancient glories. The music of this album could only be described as a more depressive Graveland, if we had to compare it to something, but even this characterization is not enough.

I'm glad to realise that Aasgard stay true to their own sound and they constantly try to evolve. Each fan of true black metal should check this album, which does not rehash standard recipes, but explores new paths for the genre. Search for the vinyl or the reissue in CD format, while you can also find similar quality epic material in the next release of the band, the split album with Briargh.

Aasgard has sat silently in the background of the Hellenic black metal scene since their inception, and it's not hard to reason why: the aesthetics they choose to render on their releases are born more of a devotion to the raw, baseline 90s Scandinavian 2nd wave ethos than the more distinguished, glorious, melodic/occult metal woven into the Greek masters Rotting Christ, Varathron, Spectral Lore, and more recently something even further out like Hail Spirit Noir. Theirs is a musical choice which runs not so much off ideas as it does an adherence to a code of sound, a stereotype, and due to that fact, their debut and EPs just never ranked all that highly with me. Competent, yes, and there is certainly an unshaking audience for that old school appeal, borne on wings of nostalgia and loyalty, one I don't actually exempt myself from. But that comes with the condition that the riffs are played with such menace or atmosphere or just raw memorable note construction that I can't resist it, and Aasgard just hasn't foot that bill...

Unfortunately, for a large fraction of Morbid Celestial Desecration, that remains the case. Raw and searing patterns of chords strung out against a melancholic, warlike backdrop where the repetition of the rhythm guitar alone is chiefly responsible for cultivating the atmosphere, all traced back to the obvious sources like Bathory, Mayhem, Gorgoroth, Burzum, Carpathian Forest, Hellhammer or other European legends, without the novelty or charisma. There is marginal crossover appeal for fans of other epic Greek black metal outfits like Nocternity or Macabre Omen, only this duo just doesn't seem to establish that same level of mood...the harsh chord progressions too often feel predictable and rarely go anywhere adventurous, to the point that once they throw in a left hook like the clean guitars sequence in "Beliefs of Native Gods" it automatically shines by default. On the other hand, Aasgard at least varies up the material so that a largely surging, blast-supported piece is followed up by a slower, tortured, depressive black metal number ("Supplication to the Immortals" an example) where there is more emphasis on making the vocal rasp sound like its being pitched at you through a drainage system. But even there, I just kept waiting for something musically compelling to stand forth and it was ever more of the same.

Morbid Celestial Desecration occasionally feels like a record patched together across a number of recording sessions, with the tones slightly altered between guitars and vocal timbres, but while that usually works against such material, here it did provide a distraction and prevent the tunes from growing overly monotonous in succession. I enjoyed the intonation of the chants in the title cut, and other small nuances spread over the 38 minute like the chilling, noisy instrumental "Infernal Virtues". The vocals are generally nasty and well fit to the songcraft. Truthfully, I even felt like the production was stronger and clearer than some of their efforts I've covered in the past, a sign of some maturation. But then the drums feel rather stock, bass lines out to pasture (if they were ever there to begin with, I definitely can't discern them), and so much of the actual riffing uninspired to the point that it sometimes feels like the band itself doesn't really care for them. It's clearly not beyond Aasgard's ken to perform early 90s black metal with the purest intentions, but there is simply not enough weaponry here to compete with hundreds of similar bands who just have a knack for putting riffs together in a way that you'll care what follows them.

That aside, I didn't mind a few spins through this. It's not exactly lazy per se, it does strive for more mood, and its stronger than what I can remember on their last output, but even with this vivacious, hellish-cold contrast mix it seems rather complacently magnetized to the past...static and unable to move forward. That might prove a boon for some black metal listeners who live as anathema to any sort of progression or consistently 'likeable' quality in their music, but even then, that sort of aesthetic antagonism has been better mastered elsewhere.

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com