ELD

Eld is the third album from norwegian black/ viking metal legends Enslaved. There were already progressive hints on Enlaved´s previous album Frost but Eld is even more interesting seen from a progressive view point. The music is still not progressive in a conventional sense though so don´t expect Eld to be much more than an interesting black metal album.

793 ( Slaget om Lindisfarne) is a 16+ minutes epic track. It starts with dark symphonic keyboards and builds to anthemic metal. There are some really heavy riffing in this song. The pace changes from mid to slow to blast beating, so this is certainly not a boring song when it comes to tempo. The singing is clean and epic in nature. Despite the long playing time this is a great song that never gets boring even though the riffs do become a bit repetitive at times.

Hordalendingen is a pretty fast song and it´s very brutal too. There are some very good eighties thrashy riffing in this song. I really like this song. Great metal. It almost reminds me of Kreator, Sodom, Destruction or any other of those eighties european thrash metal bands, just played a bit faster. The chorus section is very nordic and beautiful though.

Alfablot is another fast paced song with beautiful melodic sections with sporadic keyboards. It´s pretty syphonic when Enslaved play these parts.

Kvasirs Blod has a fast main riff and an almost gothic sounding chorus which is equally as fast. The middle section of the song again sounds like eighties euro thrash to me. The song ends with a high pitched scream which I think must be an ode to either King Diamond or Rob Halford. It´s just a guess though.

For Lenge Siden ( A Long Time Ago) starts with a sample with some nordic speaking ( I´m a Dane and I´m not sure which language this is which is pretty embarrassing really, but my guess would be Norwegian as Enslaved are from Norway but it might my Islandic because of the viking lyrics). The intro riff which lasts for almost 3 minutes is pretty melodic. The next riff is mid paced with raspy vocals and again some speaking. Then into some blast beating and then back to the midpaced riff again. The song continues to shift between midpaced riffing and blast beats. For Lenge Siden is not my favorite song on Eld.

Glemt ( FOrgotten) is a fast paced song but around the 4:30 minute mark we have some slow atmospheric riffing sections. There is even some spacy keyboard sounds. In this section there is also some clean singing. The song ends with blast beating.

The title track is the last song on the album. It alternates between intense blast beating and beautiful atmospheric parts with clean singing which reminds me of their two masterpiece albums Isa and RUUN. For prog heads this songs might be one of the more easily accessible even though nothing on Eld is probably easy to access for a prog head.

The musicianship has become very good. What you heard on Frost is even better here on Eld.

The music is pretty basic heavy metal but if you ever tried to play this style you´ll know that even though the harmonics are not very complex it´s takes a real man to endure the fast paced riffing and drumming. Now it might not be considered art on a prog rock site, but to a metal head like myself it´s definitely art. I guess it´s one of those things where it depends on the ears that hear.

The production is pretty good for the genre. It´s very raw but you can still hear what´s going on. I´m not a black metal fanatic myself and I don´t like the real lo-fi productions that many so called TRUE black metal bands use. This is a different story though as the raw sound suits the brutal music.

Don´t be fooled. This is essentially a black metal album and it´s a very extreme one too. If you generally don´t like metal you´ll definitely not want to use time listening to Eld, but if you´re curious about early Enslaved or black metal for that matter Eld is a great place to start. For prog heads only I would recommend Isa or RUUN though. Eld is worth 3 stars in my book, but mind you that this is a black metal classic and black metal fans would probably rate this much higher than me.