Immortal: The ultimate cold weather music
An overview of my favourite Black Metal band who aren't really a Black Metal band
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When there’s the slightest hint at good weather it’s as if the national psyche lifts whether you’re into sunshine or not. Before you know it you’re getting inundated by the sounds of the Fresh Prince, Aswad and in ever rarer instances Mungo Jerry.
Spotify is packed full of Summer-themed playlists. Songs to enjoy warm weather to, as you drive around with the windows down or drink Lilt in your back garden.
There’s relatively little in the way of celebrating cold weather through music in the way that we worship the sun through songs. Where are the playlists on Spotify about losing feeling in your toes as you wait for the bus? Or people tweeting a link to a song about ungritted roads with the simple caption: “a vibe”?
We might get Christmas songs, but barely more than three weeks of music based on a tradition instead of the physical environment we find ourselves in is no match to the four month window we listen to songs that make us think about the sun.
Mix summer festivals into the mix and you’ve got another load of tracks added to the repertoire of sunny songs based on their association with memories you made in good (or otherwise) weather at that time of year.
Songs about being cold simply melt in the face of their sunny counterparts.
After a prolonged spell of completely frozen weather in the UK as we hurtle towards even more darkness before the Winter solstice - there’ll be barely seven hours of daylight on the 21st where I live - why don’t we listen to music that’s in tune with our surroundings when we’re wearing layers the same way we do when we’re sweating uncomfortably?
Immortal are my favourite Black Metal band, because I’m not really a huge fan of Black Metal, and they’re not really a Black Metal band.
Coming from the same Norwegian scene that spawned the Satanists, church burners, murderers and homophobes, it’s almost a miracle that Immortal ever came to be, let alone survived to become one of the most iconic metal bands of their era thanks to silly videos filmed in the woods, in contrast to their super serious contemporaries.
Unlike those Norwegian contemporaries, Immortal generally avoided Satanic themes in their lyrics, choosing to create a fantasy world called Blashyrkh - a demon-filled land of ice and snow loosely based on Nordic legend and inspired by countryside walks around Bergen.
Given that Anton LaVey’s core values of Satanism were the enjoyment of physical existence and naturalism that sees humans as animals existing in an amoral universe, doesn’t it make sense that Immortal’s grim and frostbitten music in homage to their natural surroundings are more “Satanic” than the murder and church burning that their less articulate contemporaries were indulging in?
Although their first album, ‘Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism’, never ventures anything beyond the limits of the four-track low production values offered by the rest of the Norwegian scene in the early 90s, ‘Pure Holocaust’, and ‘Battles in the North’ which follow show an inventive band trying to push the boundaries and rules established by their corpsepainted genre contemporaries.
By 1997 ‘Blizzard Beasts’ really bucks the trend of 90s Norwegian Black Metal by mixing the drums loud and front and centre, a million miles away from the atmospheric, muddy, almost experimental type of production seen from the likes of Gorgoroth and Burzum.
The follow up, ‘At The Heart Of Winter’, is the first full realisation of Immortal’s vision of Black Metal for the masses. What made Norway’s burgeoning Black Metal scene so interesting in the early 90s, at least musically, was the fact that it was so isolated from everything else, but main men Abbath and Demonaz could recognise where their world fit into the wider context of heavy metal.
In 2002 Immortal released what is perhaps their masterpiece - ‘Sons of Northern Darkness’. Building on the excellent production values and blackened riffing they’d previously shown, what really sets Immortal’s catalogue apart from others in the world of Black Metal is the sheer quality of the songwriting.
There are dynamics - loud bits, quiet bits, fast bits, slow bits - Immortal will punish you with blast beats and atmospheric chords but they’ll take you up and down to get there first.
While the band avoided murdering each other, they couldn’t resist the pitfalls of the music business and by 2015 Abbath had gone solo because of a legal dispute with Demonaz over the band’s name.
His 2016 self-titled album is remarkably good, but as his time not performing songs about Blashyrkh grows longer and longer the grim and frostbitten influence of his former band begins to wane and he seems to be starting to miss that magic ingredient. This year’s solo album ‘Dread Reaver’ is alright, but without the strong themes prevalent throughout Immortal’s career it feels a bit light and lacking in direction.
Meanwhile Immortal has somehow continued without their iconic frontman, regressing to scratchy, murky production of old. Releasing music like this now is an imitation of a Norwegian Black Metal band, not the genuine article pushing the boundaries of the genre like they used to. Compare this direction to Darkthrone who have relentlessly released music on their own terms and are somehow now going through a phase of 1970s proto-doom worship.
Once we pass the solstice and the ice begins to thaw, I hope that the same happens to the relationship between Abbath and Demonaz. Theirs is a creative partnership that has seen them adrift and lost without each other, and heavy metal poorer with them working solo.