Werwolfthron

Absurd is a well known name in the black metal genre, infamous for their ideology and the multitude of crimes they've committed in their career, but not many people actually sit down and listen to their discography. They can be very hit or miss with their releases, and this one is a certified miss.

On Werwolfthron, the songs jump from decent black metal, to folk music, to really shitty punk tracks. The vocals are the best thing on this album, powerful and shrill, shouting German phrases that as a Canadian I can't understand. The guitars have surprisingly good production for a black metal album of this year, but bounce around way too much, from playing punk scales to quickly hopping over to folk scales, and remain far too basic. It works in the slower songs, but the faster ones just create a hot mess of sound.

Bass is of course barely audible, and the drums are basic at best, never straying too far from simple 4/4 beats. The pure black metal tracks, such as Asatr'U are pretty good, sounding similar to Horn or very early Nokturnal Mortum, but the punk ones are where it all falls apart.

Absurd has always been inspired by punk music, but the punk tracks that they recorded on this album are awful, even warrented skipping on re-listens. I'm not a punk guy myself, so I could be slightly biased, but the scratchy vocals mixed with the over simplistic guitars just does not work, it often sounds like a poor attempt at a joke, in the vein of the band Post Mortem on their later releases. The song structures are just far too simplistic to warrant much positive praise. There are of course good moments on this album, when they decide to slow down a bit and explore some folk elements, and drift away from the punk influences. The folk horns and bells were quite surprising to me, but they work really well.

In the end, it's just not really a great album, there's much better black metal albums out there, and better releases by Absurd too. I'm not giving them a bad review because of their ideology that most close minded people tend to do without actually analyzing the music, it's just flat out not good. Don't waste your money on this album when you can pick up Totenlieder which is a release that is a million miles better.

Top 3 Songs: Asatr'U, Pavane, Ein Traum