Versus the World

Picture long glassy meadows filled to the brim with gigantic blonde-hair blue-eyed men with horned helmets and gigantic axes and swords torching down houses, stealing people’s shit and generally kicking ass all over the place. How fucking awesome would it be to be one of those guys? Anyways, for those of us not of Nordic heritage, we still give tribute to this classic “viking metal” opus; Two discs (for those of us with the limited edition releases) of pure ass-kicking catchy head-banging brain-damaging brutality. What’s not to like?

Oh, wait...

I’ll start by saying that the mixture of melodic kinda-folky-but-still-ballsy marching riffs and tremolo picking palm muting assaults are a great death metal combo. The rhythm and the tempo aren’t on the high-end in comparison with many other death metal acts, but the drumming makes up well for it with the right usage of double-bass beats and almost tribal tom fills. The bass-work is simple but still good. Vocals are at their best grunting-quality.

Now for the bad part: The lack of variety and the lack of awesome guitar solos. I love the chunky axe attacks, but they could have made a much better effort at throwing some of those in there. While this album may be filled to the brim with catchy riffs, one quickly loses the enthusiasm garnered by the first track as they seem to just make a piss-poor effort at throwing anything new or nearly as interesting at you around half-way into the album.

Regardless, they get brownie points for putting on amazing live shows.