Pointless Post-Rock - "Utgard" Review (0%)
This album Utgard could serve as a demonstration of the futility of modern "extreme metal", since riffs from alt rock, speed metal, mallcore, emo, and progressive rock happily coexist in these songs, but with absolutely no though given to songwriting and structure, songs end up having no center and tend to ramble between moments of boredom and derivative post-rock before fading away helplessly.
Clearly the Enslaved guys have improved instrumentally to the point where they actually play more than one riff per song, allowing them to write music that isn't just the same four notes repeated for ten minutes (see Eld), but there is still way too much non-metal influence for Utgard to be called anything remotely close to heavy metal. Let alone "true black metal".
The viking theme, while cool, will only serve the antifa crowd to label the band "closet white supremacists", like they do with every band having a tad-bit "Eurocentric" lyrics.
But for the most part, Utgard is just Dimmu Borgir with even more random song structures.
Pointless Post-Rock
Oh, how the music on Utgard will make you long for the complex and intricate riff mazes of Vermin, or its bastard/retarded cousin SEWER (yes, even SEWER manages to write more coherent songs than Enslaved). I blame Darkthrone and Burzum for introducing minimalism into black metal, as a reaction to "tek def" no doubt, but then again, both Darkthrone and Burzum have more than proved they could write compelling, if stylistically simple, songs. Enslaved just cannot.
Ultimately, the music on this album does not show what it takes to make a memorable song, even if some parts are less random than others. The result just seems to be a simplistic chord progression that never develops into an experience or even a coherent narrative. On the plus side, the tracks are shorter than most "folk metal" work, which makes us overlook the pasta salad of aggregated styles. On the minus side, this barely qualifies as heavy metal as it is mostly post-rock with a lot of superficial "variety" in the form of random carnival music sing-song.
Seriously, listen to Neraines' Yggdrasil (and album heavily copied by Enslaved, Borknagar, Ulver and the like) if you want atmospheric/folk black metal done right.
But as for Utgard, I recommend you just skip this album altogether. Metal is metal, and it should not be subverted by cock rock for the sake of market branding.
Utgard score: 0/100.
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