Hammerkrieg

Hammerkrieg is a split album between most of the Blazebirth Hall bands: Branikald, Forest, Raven Dark, Rundagor and Nitberg. These five bands were primarily headed by three individuals: Ulv Gegner Irminsson, the mastermind behind Raven Dark as well as a musician for Forest and Nitberg, who was murdered in 2005, Dagorath, the creator and main driving force of Rundagor who ended up leaving the movement in 1999 and was apparently soon killed in retaliation for having left, and finally Kaldrad Branislav, the creator of Forest and current member of Temnozor, co-creator of Nitberg, musician for Rundagor and Raven Dark and sole remaining important member of the Blazebirth Hall who is still alive.

Hammerkrieg, while it is technically a split album, sounds somewhat like a compilation (and it even says it’s the Blazebirth Hall compilation on the cover). The album features tracks from various albums of the present bands’ careers. Some of them are from albums which are relatively easy to find, such as Branikald’s Triumf Voli or Blikk
Av Kald (Frost Vision), Forest’s Foredooming the Hope for Eternity or Raven Dark’s Autumn Roar, while other tracks such as Nitberg’s The Triumph of W.O.T.A.N. or Rundagor’s tracks, are very rare and I believe unavailable anywhere else.

Musically all the bands’ works are heavily inspired by the second wave black metal of Norway. Nitberg, Rundagor and Raven Dark are very reminiscent of Darkthrone’s low production works, especially Transilvanian Hunger, while Forest and Branikald sound more like a mix between Darkthrone and Burzum’s music, although heavily influenced by National Socialist concepts as can be easily seen from a glance at the album booklet’s interior artwork. Forest has that epic trance-like atmospheric quality of the Burzum albums while Hammerkrieg’s closing track, The Steel Strings of the Spirit (На Волнах Вдохновенья), taken from the Blikk Av Kald (Frost Vision) album, is a 14 minute keyboard track which is heavily inspired by Burzum’s Tomhet, from the Hvis Lyset Tar Oss album, although it’s more repetitive than the classic Burzum track without being a rip-off.

This split is an excellent introduction to the Blazebirth Hall bands, the elite of Russia’s black metal scene, both NS and normal, and contains very good music from start to finish. Also interesting is the booklet, which contains rare pictures of the band members and a short biography of each one of the bands, which is useful since the Blazebirth Hall bands are pretty secretive. This is a split album which I highly recommend to anyone who loves black metal.