Finally available again on DLP and CD, originally released in 1998. With a fully restored layout, including handwritten lyrics on separate booklets and totally re-mastered. Officially released by Ragnarok Records, and distributed worldwide by ASRAR. This is the only OFFICIAL version. Avoid cheap bootlegs!
The Second Wave Norwegian black metal bands, following their years of glory, inspired a hell of a lot of people all across the world to make (and indeed sometimes copy) their black metal. Many of the bands who draw much of the inspiration for their music in the Norwegian scene are so generic they barely merit any attention at all, but some bands manage to take the basics and actually create equal if not better music. Forest is one such band, having hour-long albums (this and As a Song in the Harvest of Grief) of slow and extremely raw black metal which is in a way unequalled by anything produced in Norway.
Forest's music overall, and this album is no exception, can be described as an inspirational mix between the raw black metal of Darkthrone with a certain Burzum twist to it, so as to add some atmosphere, but the atmospheric part is in no way dependent on any use of keyboards or other such instruments at all. This is pure raw black metal, the fuzzy guitar sound being present from beginning to end, evoking the dark coldness of the Russian winter spread across endless landscapes of forests in the night. This lasts for an hour with little actual changes and seemingly no variation outside the first and last songs, although it's excellent to listen to, the music itself being of supreme quality.
The vocals are quite an interesting element on the album. Kaldrad does his usual type of evil black metal screeches, although they're mixed quite low in comparison to the drums and especially the guitar sound. The drumming itself is the usual repetitive to the bone black metal standard, don't expect any technical masterpieces here because it's pretty much the same throughout, although that's what helps create the atmosphere of the album, which let's face it would be pretty much null if they had someone like Nick Barker behind the kit.
Deserving special mention are the first and last two tracks of the album because they're quite different from the rest. The album opener is called the Unfinished Song of These Woods and is a 5-minute instrumental with nothing but the rawest guitar recording one could find while actually having it sound good, creating a powerful intro for the hour of black metal to come. The last two tracks are names Untitled I & II respectively and they're mostly instrumental semi-ambient pieces which have the cleanest guitar sound on the album (especially Untitled II). These two tracks end the album with a melancholic 15 minutes of music which is reminiscent of Burzum's album structuring. Untitled II also features Kaldrad's only clean vocals on the album, in some sort of dark chanting which really suits the music well. These two last tracks are, like on several other Blazebirth Hall releases (other Forest, and Branikald albums) named Untitled so as to evoke a kind of dark uncertainty as the album reaches to an end, and not because the band ran out of fancy song titles to give at the end of the albums.
This album is yet another gem in the often excellent Russian black metal movement and is on par with the usual quality music that the Blazebirth Hall bands are known for. It's certainly a great album, capable of contending with the best black metal ever made and is definitely worth getting to anyone interested in bands who further explored the musical possibilities created by the Second Wave of black metal in Norway.
