Artist: Abbath
Country: Norway
Label: Season Of Mist
Formats: LP, CD, Cassette tape
Year: 2022
After Abbath left ‘his’ Immortal and continued under his own name, a lot has happened. Not only is Abbath already at his third album with this ‘Dread Reaver’, despite the many alcohol-soaked problems of this once-iconic Norwegian Black Metal musician, Immortal has not been idle either, they (Demonaz and Horgh) have also released album under the Immortal banner. But now there is also strife among these two remaining Immortal members. As it stands, Immortal turned out not to be so immortal after all and the quarrels, feuds and lawsuits now resemble a soap opera, however, the question in this one is who is the Bold and who is the Beautiful…
Alright, so this third album from Abbath, successor to the reasonable ‘Abbath’ (2016, Season Of Mist’) and the lesser ‘Outstrider’ (2019, Season Of Mist). Contrary to how Abbath’s ‘solo’ career is seen, musically this is not much related to Immortal, but all the more so to the short-lived Project I, along with Ice Dale (Enslaved), TC King (ex-Gorgoroth) and Demonaz and Armagedda (both ex-Immortal). At the time, it was a surprising side step (if any) in which the Immortal-recipe was infused with the collective fondness for Bathory. That sound was actually further developed on these Abbath-albums.
So it’s not all entirely new, but it nowhere reaches the level of what they presented with I, on ‘Between Two Worlds’ (2006, Nuclear Blast). There are some good riffs and ideas here and there, but it’s not really uplifting. In fact, it all sounds pretty uninspired and weary. That was so on the first two albums and it’s not different on this ‘Dread Reaver’. The faster pieces sound messy, the mid-tempo pieces much less epic than intended and the compositions are not exciting enough. Of course you can hear the unmistakable musical signature of Abbath and the whole thing sounds fine (in terms of production), but that is really insufficient to save this album – with the truly abominable Metallica-cover ‘Trapped Under Ice’ as the absolute low. As far as I’m concerned, Abbath really falls through the lower limits with this new album.
Although a man who wrote albums like ‘Pure Holocaust’, ‘Battles In The North’ and ‘At The Heart Of Winter’ has nothing more to prove, it is kind of sad to realize that little solid comes out of his musical pen anymore – not to mention all the embarrassing youtube moments where he makes a complete fool of himself. And yet, if Abbath proved anything with ‘Dread Reaver’, it’s that Immortal was so much more than the sum of its two parts.
