For Celestial Glory

For Celestial Glory is the debut album from Danish black/death metal project Fra Waurhts. Released by Schattenkult Produktionen and Dancing in the Trees in the autumn of 2015, the album is over thirty minutes long across ten roughshod tracks of pummeling, unrelenting intensity. There isn’t a lot of information available on the act, but everything seems to point to this being a one man band.

While the album’s title may hint at some type of grandiose cosmological journey, the music is about as primitive as it gets. It’s not the barbaric, knuckle dusting black/death metal, like Blasphemy or Revenge, but primitive in the sense that the music is songwriting is rather simplistic and the riffing is pretty unhinged yet still innocuous. Aside from the obligatory ambient intro/outro, Fra Waurhts fires away, guns blazing for the entirety of the album: walls of fast paced, low brow riffing wash over with brief flourishes of rabid trem picking or jarring, yet brief, chord progressions. The percussion is actually kind of neat, with first wave leanings driven into the steady, machine like beat, but there’s little in the way of tempo changes. The snare is overly loud and sounds quite wooden, but it does the draw the focus away from the unchanging riffing.

The repetitive nature of this album is probably the biggest downfall, as everything begins to blur together into a blackish gray blur of unrelenting riffing and snarled, scraping growls. There is very little variation throughout and no stand out tracks to hone in on. I mean, it’s not bad, but it offers very little to grasp onto and nothing to really write home about. It’s primitive, it’s chaotic; and it’s black/death metal. The Metal Archives lists about five thousand other bands playing black/death metal, so how is Fra Waurhts going to stand out from the pack? They aren’t going to. This takes no frills to new level; one where the band really has no identity of their own. Like I said though, it’s not bad, it’s just kind of there.

Written for The Metal Observer.