Jagdheim

Black metal is both an easy and damn difficult genre to compose and perform. It's very easy to use the low fidelity requirements and inherent simplicity of the style to make something superficially credible, but to really achieve something worth a second look, especially in the days of gazillions of bedroom bands, it takes a bunch of seriously good and fundamental ideas and some vision to make those simple lo-fi elements work.

Bergthron falls in the first category... and damn, it falls a long way.

Essentially, Jagdheim is token black metal that consists of riffs that would love to be a part of a traditional garage heavy metal band's songs. There's nothing really "black" about them, and while it's obvious that the objective has been to create something epic, spiced with heathen atmosphere, the three overlong songs on this alleged full-length are extremely, utterly boring. The vocals are powerless wailing, fortunately with such a lousy production that they are barely audible, and their purpose is not clear. The band's playing is awkward, and sounds like the first demo of your local heavy metal upstarts, composed of 14-year olds in Peter's stepdad's garage, practicing for a gig at the farmer's market in July.

A major flaw in Bergthron's music is the lack of logic in the songs. While individual passages fail to hold water or capture much interest with their amateurish achievements, the tracks are collections of parts that have little or no relation to each other. The songs have been inflated to enormous lengths by welding incompatible parts together, and the results are not tragic, just extremely boring. It's quite unlikely that a virtually random collection of sections, each one simply run-of-the-mill yawn-inducing chaff, could hold anyone's attention for 15 full minutes.

The timeline of Jagdheim, from the listener's point of view, is simple. The first track drags on and on, introducing various parts that are all essentially the same, and the audience starts to check the time at around 2:30 into the song. But the damn thing drags on to 15 minutes, and just a brief break announces the beginning of the second track... which is more of the same, but blissfully under 8 minutes of it. Fortunately, the third track, still more of the same, saves the day with its almost 13 minutes of the same, and the total length is sufficient to be called a full-length.

There are a few sections that could make good, 3-minute heavy metal songs, but the useless extending of the lackluster songs kills them and buries them under an insignificant tree in a cultivated forest of identical pines. The production does the music a final graveside service, and the boring bass is the main instrument, hiding some of the lameness of the guitar and a small part of the pathetic vocals. There are synths, too, but they deserve no mention. The album is proudly mentioned as a full-length on the band's MA page, but this is essentially a demo that suffers from boringitis and toolongevitis, and desperately needs an immediate extralengthdectomy. It will infect the listener with a boredom that will find a way to manifest in a physical way sooner or later, so expect ticks, random eye movement, itch and cold sweat if you listen to this all the way through.

This album was not worth the 3 euros it cost. Avoid Jagdheim, your time is better spent if you carefully consider the benefits and drawbacks of daffodils for the half an hour you'd waste on this crap.