Their brief break that spanned from 2002 to 2008 was revealed to be the first spat between Abbath and Demonaz, a rift that was partly healed by the again-Abbath-helmed record Between Two Worlds, which featured lyrics from Demonaz but unearthed more explicitly the ’70s hard rock, progressive rock and 80s traditional metal influences that marked the epic and grand tone of Abbath’s songwriting versus Demonaz’s more feral riffs. The records that followed are without a doubt Immortal’s golden period, consisting of the blackened and occasionally progressive thrash of Baptized in Black and the impeccable Sons of Northern Darkness. When Demonaz stepped down in 1997, Immortal’s first record with music almost solely written by Abbath was In the Heart of Winter, still their magnum opus. And, unfortunately, it’s fairly clear that that something is Abbath. And, hey, Blashyrkh was his idea anyway.īut while Northern Chaos Gods joins the new Marduk record (don’t listen to it they’re Nazis) as an old school black metal band stepping up and delivering vicious, breakneck tunes even nearly 30 years in, the record is still missing a certain something.
#IMMORTAL NORTHERN CHAOS GODS FULL#
Then tendon issues struck and Demonaz had to step down his essential nature shown by the fact that, even without playing guitar, he was listed as and considered a full member of the group, contributing lyrics and appearing in every video to date even following stepping down from the mantle. The first four Immortal records are marked by their partnerships, a melding of their sounds, the ferocity of Demonaz with the more progressive and, for lack of a better term, epic traditional metal feel of Abbath’s songwriting. Demonaz was a founding member of the band, a second guitarist alongside Abbath. Immortal has survived such a potentially catastrophic shift before. Plenty of black metal bands play at reckless abandon on the guitar Demonaz delivers.Īnd, to be fair, this shouldn’t even really come as a great shock. These aren’t tunes with blast beats tacked on these are songs that naturally demand blast beats as the only logical rhythm to their furious intensity. Demonaz keeps one eye on his tone and the other on the attack of his picking hand, giving the guitars plenty of savage bite while keeping a whiplash thrash metal tempo. There’s plenty of black metal that hides behind opaque production and crummy mixes to imply a vastness of sound and plenty more that shift so slowly between chords or notes that their tremolo pick turns their records into post-rock whether intentionally or not (the wave of post-black metal deliberately making this connection didn’t invent it ab nihilo, after all). Demonaz’s lightning-fast black metal riffing, closer to thrash than to anything else, shred across the 40-minute record. Thankfully, Immortal for the most part deliver. To top all of these issues off, it’s also their first new record in nearly a decade. It’s also simultaneously the first time that Demonaz has stepped into the role of guitarist for the band in over 20 years, as well as his first turn behind the mic for the group. After all, it’s the first Immortal record written and recorded without frontman and lead guitarist Abbath, a fixture of both the band and black metal in general for the past nearly 30 years. There was a great question mark over Northern Chaos Gods.
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