Enter the Gauntlet

At 73 minutes, Enter the Gauntlet is Ride for Revenge's longest album by almost a half hour. Well, three songs of 23, 14, and 13 minutes will do that. Basically a black/drone album, Enter the Gauntlet is Ride for Revenge extending their earlier long-form pieces to their logical extreme - one that even the 16 and 10-minute tracks on Sinking the Song wouldn't hit. Earlier albums and EPs/singles were constructed around repetition of a single theme, riff, or idea for several minutes at a time with minor changes or juxtapositions to impart a mystic and unsettling aesthetic against Harald Mentor's sprechgesang. Enter the Gauntlet takes that to an almost absurd level.

This LP is four long, murmuring songs sandwiched between four other straightforward Ride for Revenge-style black/death (the most "normal" type of track from this band) that would fit well on Under the Eye. Many tracks have little more than a single plodding riff and mid-paced ritualistic percussion. Again, all concepts that are more than present in other albums from the band, but taken far into the fold and causes doubt whether it's made for a constant, engaged listen, even considering the affect demanded by the strange Finnish scene to which the band belongs.

Depending on your mood, this is a good or bad thing. "The Fog is Green and Pungent" is almost entirely the exact same 20-second movement for its entire 23-ish minute length. "Frozen" begins so drearily it could be from a Scooby-Doo soundtrack. The earlier Ride for Revenge albums imparted a trance-like atmosphere but still strongly rewarded active listening; these are almost background music-metal, like "Rundtgåing av den transcendentale egenhetens støtte" from Burzum's Filosofem. In fact, I love reading to these kinds of tracks: they're perfect for that creeping background dread.

I never see someone saying Enter the Gauntlet is their favorite Ride for Revenge album. It's long and plodding by design. As a huge fan of the band, I'd still say check it out - just don't expect much in the way of the other releases. But if you are into this album, then check out similar black/doom/noise/drone like Flooded Church of Asmodeus. Enter the Gauntlet is practically the template for that aesthetic.

Ride for Revenge's grimey, raw blackened doom metal is an interesting oddity among the scene. I've said in the past that I'm skeptical of people just calling slow black metal as having doom influence, but for Ride for Revenge it's actually very appropriate. They take the approach of their earlier countrymen in Barathrum to an exaggerated extreme. For a good idea of Enter the Gauntlet's sound specifically, imagine Teitanblood playing Ocean Chief covers. But that's just a conceptual spin on it. As for the execution, Ride for Revenge have been rather inconsistent. When they hit, they hit hard. When they miss, they miss big time.

Enter the Gauntlet misses rather hard in particular. The gnarly guitar tone is real cool at first, but the riffs are also some of the most monotonous ones they could've come up with. The biggest offense in that area is the album's longest song "The Fog Is Green and Pungent" which just sounds like the band fell too far in love with Earth's "Ouroboros is Broken". "Victorius", one of the two other long songs on the album, ultimately succumbs to this fate as well just a bit before halfway through. When the songs get this long, the guitar tone just starts to get headache inducing which is a problem when the album winds up being 73 minutes long. The shorter songs aren't even worth remembering because of how dwarfed they are in comparison to the three songs that take up the majority of the album's run time.

If you're exploring Ride for Revenge's discography, Enter the Gauntlet is an album you can easily skip unless you're really into droney shit in metal. While it does contain the track "Frozen" which is easily the true highlight of the album, Enter the Gauntlet goes to show that Ride for Revenge should not write songs longer than 10 minutes.