Primordial – A Journey’s End (Reissue)
Posted on October 07, 2009 at 5:55 pm by admin
Every now and then a band puts out their first album which doesn’t quite nail their concept, but the idea is there. I had gotten my hands on their debut album, “Imrama” from ’95, and they were certainly moving from a slow style of black metal, trying hard to incorporate celtic influences. The end result was alright, but the kinks just needed to be worked out. On “A Journey’s End” however, they’ve managed to hone and focus the concept coming closer to what they had perhaps intended.
Now those celtic influences take up about 50% of the album, which acoustics and singing half the time. Taken out of context, certain songs and long passages wouldn’t be considered metal. You still have the cold, stark black metal guitars and raspy vocals when the time comes, but even the patterning of the distorted guitars is much more celtic this time around, yet there’s a doom type of feel due to the slower nature of of the music. Everything is wrapped up in a raw package that’s a bit on the loose side, which itself is a double-edged sword. While raw on one hand, the particular style of that Primordial is going in won’t lend itself well to rawness in the end, but on this album it’s works to a degree.
While the formula has been touched up on “A Journey’s End”, the idea was worked out much better, and the songs were blended together in a more cohesive fashion, though the slow and sometimes repetitive nature of the music, as well as the long songs often cause the album to drag.
Included in the reissue is a bonus disc with some extremely raw live audio from about the same period of the album (1998). It’s harsh stuff to listen too, like a black metal live show from the underground, and the guitars do get pulled out of tune, and the sound is pretty raw for what you get, though the live recording I’d say is polarizing enough to be up to the personal preference of the listener. Since we always go on the assumption that if a listener is giving an album a chance, they’ll take in such dividing elements as positive, so the bonus disc could remind you of some very underground live bootleg from an early 80’s extreme metal band of some sort, done well enough to have the majority of the instruments come out. In this case of course, it was Primordial in their chosen style which was extremely underground at the time (and still is in some ways).
Released September 29th, 2009
Primordial at MySpace
Metal Blade Records at MySpace
Buy this album at Amazon.com and Amazon.ca
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