Vandrer...

Appropriately for an act based in Murmansk in far northern European Russia, this music has a very icy steel edge offset by surprisingly melodic lead guitar which sounds a bit like the guitar tone Ukrainian band Drudkh had on their "Blood in our Wells" album: it's a high-pitched mournful sound full of longing. But there is plenty of robust force in the rhythms and the drumming which helps to drive the melodies and blasting riffs. This is the kind of music that helps to restore your faith in Russian BM after the shenanigans of the Blazebirth Hall group whose musicians often meet their Maker all too soon: surely if an act as good as Stielas Storhett can come from a provincial city like Murmansk, what other towns and cities throughout Russia could be harbouring potentially great BM bands?

Opening track "Der letzte November" gives us a taste of what's to come: frenzied rhythms, drumming that varies in pace, blasts of freezing cold riffs and catchy lead guitar lines that soar heavenward. The music often surges with a lot of aggression in parts. Probably the only weak point here is the singing: it's the usual grim distorted vocal which isn't anything special here, it just manages to sound crabby enough and isn't very prominent in the mix. I should think if you live in a place far from the delights of St Petersburg and Moscow and where the harbour is full of rotting old Soviet warships, you would be really pissed off. Title piece "Vandrer ..." is a fast aggressive song with almost rock-out parts, sort of old school thrash or power metal, and nostalgic lead guitar tunes in the slower sections of the song.

The sound can be really tinny especially on "Grafin Dammerlicht" where what should be very thunderous rhythms come off like chattering steel needles but apart from this the song has a funereal atmosphere and doomy pace which make your skin crawl. It's very apparent that SS man Damien TG has a real knack for composing and arranging real songs with strong forceful rhythms and very catchy melodies alternating with gale-force blasts of sub-zero temperature riffs so I find it a bit puzzling that he has covered two songs by Darkthrone ("Unholy Black Metal") and Burzum ("Erblicket die Tochter des Firmaments") as if to suggest he's not that much of a songwriter that he's got to pad out the album with other people's songs. I don't know much of Darkthrone's music so I can't say if the SS version of "Unholy Black Metal" compares well with the original but there is a very menacing and primitive mood in the rhythms so he has probably stuck quite close to the original riffs while letting the lead guitar rise in poisonous clouds or scrabble away so furiously the strings nearly wear away to dust. The Burzum cover is a strong, fast and muscular piece with good riffing (plus an extra riff not in the original song) but the vocals, wrapped in reverb, are forgettable.

"Stille weize Wildnis" is a fast track that combines rolling drums and showers of raw BM guitar with poppy elements: more catchy melodies, stop-start rhythms might not be out of place on a Metallica record and a rock-n-roll urgency. I'm surprised that for a long album (62 minutes) there isn't that much filler material: all songs more or less have strong structures and consistently good musicianship, and only "Nymane" which features a girl's orgasmic breathing that gets more hysterical and funny, could be said to be cartoony and out of place on this record, a real definite no-no.

This is an impressive album, the care, effort and passion Damien TG has put into it really shows. Admittedly the quality of the sound isn't great and it seems top-heavy and tinny with next to nothing in the bass but I think this was a deliberate decision to emphasise the icy aspect of the music. The singing is no great shakes either but after a while you come to accept it as just another element in the raging music. Damien TG has a lot of talent as an all-round musician so let's hope he can go very far with this project.