Faagrim

Faagrim - Blutfrost
Christhunt Productions, 2009
Genre: Black Metal

1. Winterstille
2. Marsch Durch das Nordland
3. Wenn der Schnee Schmilzt
4. Alte Werte Neu Entfachen
5. Unter einer Krone Dach
6. Kjelld
7. Blutfrost








Faagrim is the very promising solo project from Rottensang.  Aside from the beautiful cover there are a few flaws with this debut release, but a lot of things he did right.  Prior to this he was the vocalist for the band Northern Blood, which only put out a self-release CD and I have not heard this.  It must have carried some interest for others to go from no demo to releasing this full length.  Unfortunately spending some time in the demo phase may have done this a bit more justice, in my opinion.

Musically I think this sounds heavily influenced by bands like Sargeist.  With that comes all the other references of Horna and so on, but I think rhythmically this band is modeled more after Sargeist.  The only thing that really hurts this release is that in Sargeist there are two distinct guitars playing and Faagrim is like Sargeist without that lead piece.  Unfortunately this really detracts from what could have been a truly incredible listen.  I will point out that Sargeist didn't grab me with their first recordings either, so like them, I can definitely hear Faagrim's potential of becoming something much greater.

One thing that is sort of strange about this album is that I felt like the writing got stronger as the album progressed.  The two last tracks were by far the best on the album.  Albeit "Blutfrost" has a sort of acoustic interlude similar to into (Winterstille), but I felt this broke up the song in a way that wasn't as good.  Still the overall guitar arrangements were extremely well done.  This is why I think this band has serious potential to put together something extremely good in the future they just haven't hit that sweet spot yet.

Another issue I found with this is that the guitar tone is a little on the fuzzy side.  I think if they turned down the gain on the guitars ever so little it would give an excellent tone to the riffs.  The only other gripe I can think of is the programmed drums.  Though he used quite a good drum program with some fairly good sounding cymbal samples, I just don't think the drums are as varied as a real drummer would come up with.

This isn't necessarily something you need to rush out and hear, but it is a fairly solid debut for what it is.  I'm looking forward to what this band will produce in the future.  Anyway I close with "Kjelld" a very fine song.