Inner Receivings

What’s that special ingredient that made black metal the maddening, unholy bastion it was back when Satan reared his ugly head? Was it the bone-crushing heaviness? The blasphemous rhetoric? All that corpse paint? Well, that all depends, but for me, it was the ATMOSPHERE. That tangible way electric guitars, drums, shrieking and (occasionally) keyboard lines come together and evoke a mental, spiritual, and at times physical image of dark, haunted wildernesses in the dead of night. The way albums like “In the Nightside Eclipse”, “Pure Holocaust” and “Dusk…and Her Embrace” fascinated and scared the living hell out of unsuspecting thrashers and death-heads with their atmospheric inky blackness. Nowadays such evocation is practically non-existent, as modern black metal acts instead shoot for brutality for the sake of being brutal with no real sense of natural wonder, which in and of itself leaves a rather iffy taste in the mouth of us old-timers who know what we want with our black metal.

And it’s with that mindset that I took this Sorgeldom to the test to see if they have the chops to bring that old, wicked midnight back to form…

Well, first thing’s first…these guys have a good grasp of the atmospheric. There’s a definitive lushness in the production and performance, with nary a sense of holy sunlight permeating within. Black to a resolute degree, Sorgeldom present a nice, mid-paced funeral march into an ever-thickening mist of darkness, surrounding and attempting to suffocate as best its arrangements and performances can allow. One can detect that disconnecting madness of older Immortal, black-to-Viking-era Bathory, and a little bit of older In the Woods… (with that blackened progressive sound) by way the guitar riffs and percussive nastiness, made a bit easier by the slight lack of vocals and drum blasting, showcasing some grand ideas flittering by with a reckless abandon that’s blackened to the core, heard by the likes of “I Kloaken Lättar Vi Ankar”, “Dårskapens Karneval” and “Summer Day”. Good to hear a newer BM act that seems to know what they’re doing in terms of bringing to light such mentalities.
On the other hand, there’s not a lot of perfection in this cavalcade of metallicism. For as vision-inducing as their wares are, I can’t say that the overall arrangements are in tip-top shape. A few of the riffs and movements are a touch too repetitive to truly enjoy (note to bands of this caliber: repetitiveness is best left to those Burzum-clone suicidal black metal acts, those who want to beat a numbing nihilism into their fan base.) It takes only a few repeats of a particularly epic section to appreciate, and should it start all over again it takes some of that majesty away, making one long for something else to happen. This doesn’t happen very often, but when it does it’s quite noticeable, as in the case of “The Cold Empty Void” and “Inner Receivings”, which garners a bit of fast-forwarding to ensure the listener finds another section that makes for more fanciful listens than that.

In the end Sorgeldom’s “Inner Receivings” has potential in its atmospheric ability, but it’s offset by a few questionable tactics. If they can tone down the repeats and stick with the strengths present they’ll really have something going for themselves.