Рдяндалир

I must say that I was somewhat intimidated by Branikald’s Rdjandalir at first. Every once in a while, I’d hear something about that album and then go look it up. I was always intimidated by albums that had four songs which were an average of 10 minutes (plus I hear it was a NS album and I usually think that that kind of music is just a bunch of Jew/Christian/other-group-of-people-hated-by-Aryans crap that all sounded the same) but after finally listening to this album, I realized this fear caused me to miss out on a lot of excellent music.

The music on this album is quite interesting. The quality is not necessarily the best (in fact you could say the quality is in fact “really shit”) but I find that the quality combined with the music creates an amazing atmosphere. In fact, you could argue that the atmosphere is indeed the best trait of the entire album. It doesn’t just stop with the atmosphere either. The atmosphere along with the lyrics go on to create such emotions as sadness and depression and amazing imagery, just look at the lyrics of the title track: “Through the hoarfrost forest and smoke of/the colder surface we piece the chest of Welkin/to the paint the sea with blazes far”.

In my opinion, this is a winning black metal album. Kaldrad has indeed managed to take the cold and melancholy aspects of his homeland of Russia and combine it with the harsh grimness of raw black metal to create a true black metal classic.