Dol Guldur

While in this day and age, putting such an emphasis on uplifting, more ambient-styled keyboards with mid-tempo black metal tremolo as a backdrop is fairly common and perhaps that style is even becoming more saturated with bands than actual black metal is, this album was released in nineteen-ninety-fucking-seven. Add the RPG-soundtrack edge to the sound and the song development almost slower than Burzum's and the fact that the second wave was only really beginning to come to an end and you have to wonder: what the fuck did people think of this back then?

Dol Guldur is the epitome of Summoning's sound. It is perhaps the release where the elements at play characteristic to Summoning have manifested themselves with the most prominence; the motivation to distance themselves from black metal and come into their own was high and the ideas given birth by Minas Morgul are fully explored, and it's the first album I think people getting into Summoning should check out because it's probably the most accurate overarching representation of what they sound like. Right away, when the low, ominous keyboards of "Angbands Schmieden" kick in, with the additional layers slowly giving the music a more defined rhythm, there's already a distinctly different feeling from the preceding albums already setting in. The drums kick in, and they set the tone for the rest of the album; a triumphant marching rhythm that benefits the overall package greatly, giving strength to the harmonies and propelling the song forward constantly. Really, the music necessitates it; without the kind of rhythms present here the music would lose a huge amount of its personality, for sure. It's pretty much impossible to air-drum to this; the multitude of drum hits just wrap themselves around every corner of your ears and just kind of glue you to your chair. Protector is just a "little drummerboy at heart" as Silenius once put it.

This is the first leg of the journey; there's moments of adventure and glory scattered throughout, but the majority of it is a forest of endlessly similar scenes. It's long, repetitive and occasionally taxing on one's patience but it works because of how genuine and carefully composed it is. It's cheese, but it's some of the world's most finest crafted cheese. Most of the album's consistency is driven by the tremolo riffing, but at about 3 minutes in on "Nightshade Forests" we see some of the first embryos of what would become Summoning's amazing, idiosyncratic intricate riff style. It's like a black metal riff, but it has more notes and it's more...fluid than black metal riffs are, especially compared to what they had been showcasing before this point. It's a great riff and although they'd definitely present this sort of thing in a much more fully realized form on subsequent albums but this makes what had up until that point been one of Summoning's more mediocre songs a highlight of the album. Summoning doesn't really write many bad riffs, but as a caveat of the more drawn-out, keyboard-focused song structures the riffs can sometimes wear thin after a while and they're much more sparse than they would be on their later efforts. The synths, on the other hand, are much more elaborate and plentiful in melodies- sometimes many building on top each other simultaneously, giving several layers of harmony intertwined with the drums, giving you something new to come back to every time you listen.

This was the first Summoning album that had only eight songs- the two albums before that each had eleven, and every album after this one had eight (except Stronghold, which had nine); that sort of signals a pattern in their songwriting and focus that would manifest itself for years to come, and another pattern emerges on this album as well: the two dudes from Austria really do have a knack for writing mind-blowing closing tracks, and "Over Old Hills" may indeed be the best moment of the album. The final song is usually a slower "ballad" sort of deal, like the emergence to the destination at the end of the journey at sunrise; slow encapsulating and vast. Their uncompromising theatrical nature and repetition is taken to its (il)logical extreme, and I don't know how but it combines all that with some weird vocoder effect and it fuckin' works, dammit! Summoning are at their best when they're at their cheesiest, and luckily they're not self-conscious enough to not be cheesy all the time. Despite how ultimately essential of a record this is if you have any interest at all in Summoning and how many great moments and tracks it has on it, this is far from their best album. It takes a little while to grow on you, because it really is an exhausting listen, and at the end of the day, they'd end up doing better things as they matured the sound further. This is the first leg of the journey, and much has been explored and accomplished through the treacherous and draining foray; the real adventures and victories are on the horizon. In but a couple of years, the true potential of what could be done with this new approach would be revealed. The only piece left in the puzzle is those golden riffs...