14. Immortal - Sons Of Northern Darkness (2002)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvqQve1dpOk Blackened death, thrashy black, call it what you like, Immortal's Sons Of Northern Darkness was a relentless icy blast of an album from this Norwegian trio. These iconic creatures in their corpse paint and spiked gauntlets had a surprisingly listenable style - by the close of the nineties we were pretty tired of cacophonous church-burning black metal, so this was a welcome change of pace when it hit us early in the new millennium. And it hit us hard. Buzzsaw guitars cranked alongside the drum assault in a more thrashy tone than earlier albums which was a far cry from the thrash that was coming out of the States, and also quite different from the elitist black metal we were hearing back then. The sentiment was dark but without the weary satanic mutterings of their contemporaries, with vocalist Abbath Doom Occulta's delivery sounding like a particularly wicked dark elf. Unlike a lot of the other extreme metal coming from the Scandinavian and Germanic regions at the time, Sons Of Northern Darkness sat neatly in between the old "brash and near-intelligible" sound and the "shiny and over-produced" that was on the rise - a stellar album hanging happily on the edge of its genre.
Henry Dowling
Contributor
Game-obsessed since the moment I could twiddle both thumbs independently. Equally enthralled by all the genres of music that your parents warned you about.
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Henry