Relistening to Immortal’s brief tryptic of eccentricity from ‘Pure Holocaust’ to ‘Blizzard Beasts’ reawakens one of the great what-ifs? of black metal. Namely, what if Demonaz had never developed tendinitis? These albums are striking for a number of reasons. One forgets how eclectic Nordic black metal was in the mid-90s, and for Immortal in particular, their apex boasts some of the most dramatic variation from album to album. Each foregrounds different aspects of that intense and technically minded interpretation that made Immortal so unique at the time. Each clocks in at barely half an hour whilst adding more to the vocabulary of black metal than many contemporary artists achieve across their entire careers. And each foregrounds a very different flaw to the last, alienating a different corner of their fanbase by rendering them explicit and inescapable. The most obvious on the earlier material being Abbath’s drumming, whose unsteady sense of rhythm barely keeps up with the three dimensional riffcraft of Demonaz, who was at the height of his powers on their two most iconic works in ‘Pure Holocaust’ and ‘Battles in the North’.
‘Pure Holocaust’ both consolidates the direction Mayhem had fashioned up to that point whilst anticipating the apex of Mayhem’s recorded material across ‘De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas’ released the following year. The latent blackened thrash of Bathory cements these pieces together, anchoring Demonaz’s wilder esoteric ambitions to a linear sense of forward motion. His riffing is such that listeners are free to choose their own journey through this album. One is free to zoom out and behold the totality as one would a detailed landscape painting. Or study the intricacy of each moment, the fluidity of which mirrors the unknowable dynamics of a waterfall, a complex object in constant flux supervening on a myriad of instances and relationships compounding on one another. The tracks are compact, with riffs knitted seamlessly together, only occasionally breaking into crescendos of dramatic import. The relentless waves of guitar noise in turn help to paper over the shortcomings behind Abbath’s shaky mastery of the drum kit.
‘Battles in the North’ feels like a demo collection by comparison, so aggressively rough is the mix, blunt the performance, and immature the delivery. Despite this, it holds an appeal every bit as enduring as the albums it falls between. Here, Immortal choose to zoom in on one particular facet of the previous album as the jumping off point. Namely, the overwhelming, borderline absurd cacophony of tremolo riffing compounding one on top of the other, producing the cutesy “blizzard metal” moniker. Where Darkthrone or Burzum used this technique to create ambience, Immortal treated as an assault weapon, raining down barrages of bellicose noise to create a clear dividing line between the listener and the hostility of the cold wildernesses they so revere.
Revisiting this album reveals a striking melodic character beneath the weaponised barbarism of the guitar philosophy however. The character of ‘Battles in the North’ may be more heroic/epic than its experimental predecessor, but it is no less novel for the fact. This, again, was an interpretation of black metal unlike any of their contemporaries. Beneath the pre-internet memes and Abbath’s sometimes hard to swallow histrionics sits a unique pillar of Nordic black metal that stands in contrast both to the symphonic grandiosity of Emperor and the lo-fi hostility of Darkthrone.
‘Blizzard Beasts’ represents their most experimental work. Injecting fragments of jagged death metal contouring beneath runs of linear, blasting winter metal. The uneven production forms simultaneously the album’s charm and its greatest crime. The firm percussive guidance of Horgh is hampered by one of the weakest drums mixes in black metal, completely supressing any benefit Demonaz’s increasingly wild riffing may have received from the renewed confidence within the rhythm section.
But it was the epic ‘Mountains of Might’ and not the cyclically weird ‘Suns that Sank Below’ or ‘Noctambulant’ that proved to be the telos that Immortal were transitioning to on this paragon of transition albums. It’s unlikely that Immortal’s trajectory would have been dramatically different had Demonaz not been benched due to ill health. But the decline was undeniably hastened by these events. There is a bluntness to Abbath’s power thrash melodicism that dispenses with any hint of abstract ambition, going straight for the gullet of geeky boner metal heroism.
Immortal from ‘At the Heart of Winter’ onwards are not short of enjoyable moments. For melodic blackened thrash they are something of a benchmark for the genre. But it was a shift in direction with diminishing returns. Abbath may have been able to balance his clear passion for postmodernist ironic play with a genuinely imaginative melodic package on ‘At the Heart of Winter’, but each new attempt to rebottle the lightning fell flatter than the last. Until we finally reach ‘In my Kingdom Cold’ on 2002’s ‘Sons of Northern Darkness’, and a plodding, one chord breakdown circles round for another take and Abbath declares “here we go again”. At this point one can’t help but wonder how this well oil machine was reduced to glorified blackened party metal.
Of the original Norwegian crop, for those that weren’t consumed by bitterness or criminal records, self-parody was a common fate. For Immortal, the nadir was not low enough for the wider fanbase to abandon them entirely, many bought into Immortal’s new groove thanks to Abbath’s ability to knit a façade of extremity into strikingly catchy pop metal hooks. Something he carried through into his solo career that has only recently run out of creative road. The fact that Demonaz remained heavily involved as manager and lyricist – and taking into account his own solo effort ‘March of the Norse Gods’ in 2011 – for many years indicates that he was every bit as invested in the project of homogenising Immortal’s past achievements into a convenience brand.
Most striking in recent years has been the fact that latter day darling of the scene Lamp of Murmur chose ‘At the Heart of Winter’ to plagiarise for their 2023 effort ‘Saturnian Bloodstorm’. This illustrates the enduring popularity of ‘At the Heart of Winter’ whilst highlighting the challenges artists continue to face in attempting to imitate the creative peak of Immortal from 1993-97. They are the result of as many poor choices as they are intentionality. Accidents at the mixing desk constitute as much of the magic as the oddball musicianship.
These albums stand as testament to the considered artistry that Demonaz and to a lesser extent Abbath once represented in contrast to their modern day role as meme fodder. But more importantly, perhaps they represent an untapped potential left within even one of the most visible entities of the original black metal explosion. For all the new material I spend time with every week, it’s very rare that comparisons with ‘Pure Holocaust’, ‘Battles in the North’, or ‘Blizzard Beasts’ seem warranted. Echoes of Burzum, Emperor, or Darkthrone, by contrast, are reliably invoked on a monthly basis when analysing each month’s fresh drops.
A cursory glance down the conflicting opinions buried within the Metal Archives reviews for the classic Immortal albums reveals much about their contested legacy, and the fact that they continue to frustrate the expectations of even the most committed fan. Ultimately this is because they represent the best features of black metal as a creative force. Sloppy, flawed, at times ridiculous and self-sabotaging. But also hostile, alienating, unapologetic, and fearlessly original at a molecular level.
Hate Meditations 
Leave a comment