Månegarm

Nordstjärnans tidsålder

(c)1998 Displeased Records

Review by Neil St.Laurent

Thanks to Displeased for the CD

Still relatively unknown, Swedish Månegarm come to us with "Nordstjärnans tidsålder", their debut album, released on Displeased Records. Having released a couple of demos and going through some major lineup changes, the band has still managed to be here today with their form of black metal.

Opening with a fairly standard instrumental keyboard track it is quite apparent from the start that Månegarm will quite closely resemble fairly typical black metal. As with almost all in the genre, there are plenty of those really fast drum and guitar sections where making out any individual component, riff, or otherwise is a futile attempt. The music is however fairly tight and the patterns of the guitar trace well with that of the drums, a little better than the bass, at least most of the time. Often in the middle of a song the current tempo will just cease and be immediately picked up by something else, usually a little slower. While this may make for an interesting effect, it makes it sound like a medley of various songs.

Much of the music of Månegarm is folk influenced, of the variety popularized by Amorphis; hopefully their Nordic brethren won't exile them for the almost celtic sounding "Ymer" (track 7). The parts where the violin (or viola) have a significant role is not too often, and at these points the rest of the instruments seem to run into some kind of hapless noise or just disappear all together. In the end these components aren't blended enough with the entire album to really make their presence necessary.

Månegarm has an impressive array of song components, choruses, effects, and otherwise to make an impressive recording, and while their seemingly random culmination may be interesting for some period of time, that period isn't going to be very long. It too often seems as though the band got caught up doing some part of a song, was really enjoying it, but then somebody said "Hey, we need to be more black metal-ish", and so with no introduction or cause the needless high pitched cacophony starts. It's this very close-minded approach to the song writing that ultimately hurts the band.

"Nordstjärnans tidsålder" is at best a very long demo: the band displays their ability to play the instruments and construct very appealing song components, but the maturety to write entire songs simply hasn't evolved yet. In the hands of another producer, or extra influence in song-writing, perhaps this album could have been done a little better. Possibly the band was given an opportunity to do an album just a little early in their lifetime, but without a doubt there is enough hear to make anyone anticipate the release of a followup (the period from this one to the next should be enough for the band to tune up their writing skills).

Månegarm is:
Viktor Hemgren - Vocals
Jonas Almquist - Guitars
Markus Andé - Guitars
Pierre Wilhelmson - Bass
Erik Grawsiö - Drums, Keyboards

Contact:

Fax: +46(0)17652556 (Pierre Wilhemson)

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