Enslaved — Utgard
Enslaved has always been on the spiritual margins of black metal. Their early second wave sound was never as straightforward as early Mayhem or Darkthrone, and though their music was grand, it veered towards introspective esotericism rather than the traditionally cinematic Emperor. Throughout their career, Enslaved have traded blast beats for heavy metal gallops, tremolos riffs for spacy progressive rock leads. Every few album cycles, the band faced the same choice: evolve or die. Following the tail of 2017’s “E”, Enslaved found themselves at another crossroads. Both drummer Cato Bekkevold and keyboardist Herbrand Larsen departed, leaving them down not two, but three musical talents. After all, Larsen proved to be a formidable vocalist in the band’s lineup, one that characterized the entirety of the band’s modern sound. It was time to evolve again.
“Utgard” feels like the the kind of album a hungry young outfit would write, eager to prove themselves, not the work of a twenty year old metal institution. This is in large part due to newcomers Håkon Vinje and Iver Sandøy who not only give fantastic performances, but also inject the band with fresh ideas and renewed vitality. Unlike albums “Riitiir” through “E”, the band finds progressive structures in concise song lengths. Those nine to ten minute progressive epics have been trimmed of all the fat, leaving only tightly written and invariably exciting music. The brevity pays off. More than any Enslaved album, “Utgard” is a coiled spring of energy, taught and bursting at the seams with ideas. It’s easy to forgive an awkward transition here and there (the abrupt shift to a keys interlude in Jettegryta comes to mind) when the overall effect is so powerful.
The album’s actual sound owes a lot to the new blood too, from the album’s dual clean vocal work and truly majestic synthesizers. “Sequence”, an early album highlight, stomps out of the gate with an up-tempo groove and that builds and bursts into a ferocious black metal charge, the most aggressive moment on the album. But that’s when Enslaved pull their favourite trick; the guitars soon melt away to reveal a shimmering, starlit river of synthesizers just beyond. The harmony between Vinje’s incredible solo and Grutle’s sinuous bass lines create music as spaced out and moody as anything from “Monumension” in a fraction of the time it took the band fifteen years ago. Anyone would be forgiven in thinking they’ve played together for years.
Moreover the album’s first single, “Homebound”, is a great showcase for drummer and vocalist Iver Sandøy. Right off the heels of “Sequence”, listeners are hit with two muscular verses that oscillate between prog riffing and feverish black metal shredding. The transition is quick and smooth, which makes it impressive that Sandøy can so deftly uphold the song’s stylistic shifts. The rollicking energy culminates in a massive chorus, Sandøy’s very best vocal performance on the album. He belts his pipes to over triumphant and surprisingly old school Viking metal, sounding nothing like his predecessors, and closes out the album’s first half with a resounding high note.
Both “Sequence” and “Homebound” come relatively early in the album and are both the kind of showstoppers that seals these newcomers as real powerhouse creative forces in the band. “Utgard” feels fresher than any Enslaved album is recent memory, more akin to their early days of “Martraum” or “Below the Lights” than the time-tested sound of their later material. There are still growing pains here and there, with tracks like “Urjotun” concluding far quicker than you’d expect — especially considering its novel kraut rock synth line. But the weirdness and willingness to experiment is exciting. If anything “Utgard” is a promise of fascinating music to come, and when that promise is the freshest album a band has released in a decade’s time, it’s a pledge worth any extreme metal fan’s stock.
