A Journey to a Greater End...

As expected, Rimfrost were a whole shitload heavier at the start of their career than they are right now, despite the Swedes’ intention to sound as much like Immortal as possible the whole time. Back in 2005, A Journey to a Greater End… was the first official release, taking 2 of its 3 tracks from the same year’s demo recording, Winds of Hostility. In a sense, I was expecting this to sound more Immortal-ish, since I could have approached this as a normal adventurous yet accessible black metal EP if I hadn’t already known about Rimfrost. The closest parallel to the Norwegian heroes remains the sound of At the Heart of Winter, rough guitar tone and all, plus Rimfrost offer up enough of death and thrash metal to keep the iciness of the experience a decidedly riff-heavy one. These 3 long songs make up a pretty aggressive and confident statement.

This debut definitely saw Rimfrost throwing caution to the wind in terms of song length and number of riffs. From the instant pummelling that the listener receives upon pressing play, the trio shower riffs down in all sorts of forms, particularly using the massive, craggy guitar tone to make the chugs and palm-mutes sound like rocks falling from mountaintops, while a few faster tremolo riffs see blasting added by necessity. All this keeps the intensity high and the pace of the songs fast, though individual sections rarely reach thrash velocity. It’s simply the density of the sound that causes me to feel this is heavier and faster than the style actually merits. A quality that I feel has always been underestimated in less traditional black metal styles like this comes to light through the sheer amount of riffs Rimfrost throw down: that is, sometimes playing riffs and changing them regularly can conjure epic moods without needing to play especially epic riffs. It was true for At the Heart of Winter and, aside from a couple of more deliberate attempts to accentuate sensations of glory, A Journey to a Greater End… feels modestly epic too, notably when the vocals join the fray. Unlike the less obvious similarity of the riffs, these vocals are pretty much a copy of Abbath’s.

Despite the songs all having plenty of tasty musical content to keep the listener paying attention, I don’t feel that any of them really needed to be so long, since they aren’t structured helpfully, nor do they all have a specific destination in mind. The longest track, ‘A Frozen World Unknown’, simply dashes through a forest of icy riffs, discarding one after the other until the final section focuses on a more rhythmic groove before (almost) ending with reflective clean guitar. The “almost” in brackets really means that it should have ended with reflective clean guitar, but the band decide to throw another brief section in for no particular reason. Better planning and more dynamic shifts would have been very useful in such long cuts. On the whole though, I have quite a good time listening to A Journey to a Greater End… and don’t begrudge the obvious influences, since the world needs a little more of the music Immortal made around the turn of the century. Of the 3 songs, I feel that ‘Darken’ slightly has the share of riffs and makes the most sense out of them, so Rimfrost’s debut EP ends on a very positive note.