Northern Supremacy

'Northern Supremacy' does not begin on a promising note. Dreary, droning keys don't do it for me nine times out of ten, and the number of black metal albums that begin in such a way is getting alarming. It picks up quite a bit after the intro track, but still, come on, drone intros are getting horribly overdone.

Anyway, Frost plays a style of black metal that's similar to a more polished Bloodaxe. There's a lot of fast-paced, somewhat droning blasting, but the music doesn't feel as raw and savage as Bloodaxe: it's more measured and I suppose more eloquent overall. It's more produced: everything's soaked in reverb and given more acoustic space, giving everything a vibrating, humming tone like a lot of newer black metal artists. The delivery also often drops down to a pretty low tempo, much more often than Bloodaxe's near constant blasting. The riffing is the centerpiece of the music, and everything else is designed to support it. In this case, the riffing is done in long sections of tremolo, with rather obscure melodies channeled through the frozen, droning guitar tone.

As far as songwriting goes, it's a rather mixed bag. As an album that relies almost entirely on the strength of its riffing, each song must generally be judged by those riffs. And as far as those go, the quality is pretty scattershot. Some of them are quite good, but most are pretty average; not quite good, not quite bad, just sort of there. They work very well at generating the icy atmosphere that defines 'Northern Supremacy', but I don't feel that they're all that interesting to listen to on their own. If I listen to this purely as an atmospheric piece and not something meant to be 'listened to' in a normal fashion, it's pretty awesome, but I do like actively hearing the music I choose to listen to as well. Atmosphere is important, but so is content. And with everything else being designed to facilitate the trancelike atmosphere, you have to be pretty sure that your riffs are very strong to carry such a music.

So in the end, I'm rather in the middle of the road when it comes to this release. It kind of reminds me of the newest Xasthur album in a way: it's great at creating the atmosphere it goes for, but I'm not so sure I really find that atmosphere very interesting. Perhaps it's something that's excellent at what it does but simply not my thing. Not sure why it wouldn't; I love a lot of droning black metal, and there's not anything radically different about this one. It all comes down to personal taste, so I recommend you give the material here a listen and draw your own conclusions.