Review: ULVEDHARR “Total War”

ULVEDHARR “Total War”
Scarlet Records

When I saw name of the band, logo and tittle of the album and even cover-art I thought: “Well, these days I only receive Black Metal”. Of course I have nothing against Black Metal so there was anything pejorative in this thought. But I’ll be honest with you – I was nicely surprised when I heard first notes of “Total War”. The reason probably was that I just grew up on such playing and it’ll always be something special for me.

Ensemble was born not so long time ago – in 2011. But there always played diligent and first of all creative guys. Proof here is number of releases: three full-lengths (‘Total War’ is 3rd) and two shorter stuffs called by band EPs. Well, I still have, and will always have, mixed feelings about digital stuffs and will never understand what difference is between released digitally for example demo and EP. But nevermind!!! That’re only doubts of old orthodox and you shouldn’t care about it at all.

Anyway, ‘Total War’ contains eleven (first and last are instrumental ones, so you can call it intro and outro, if you want) songs of classic Death Metal in old Swedish style mostly. The very best part if you know very well what it means and how it sounds, so I could with clean consciousness end this review right here. But I’ll don’t do it because I wanna have good pretext to still listen to this album. Riffs are aggressive and rather short. Fabrizio and “Jack” run forward. But, contrary to first appearances, this is not so easy from technical point of view. There’s of course element of melody here, too. Mike drums energetically and ballsy – just like it should be in such music. Of course there’re passages, slower parts and so on, too. Marco follows him what is anything strange in because that’s main role of bass in music (not only Metal). Fabrizio uses mostly pure old-school Death Metal vocalizations, but there’re short moments of deep growling as well. If someone doesn’t know what I’m talking about then should listen to for example DISMEMBER and CANNIBAL CORPSE and will clearly hear this difference (if not then is stone deaf).

Generally ‘Total War’ is good album and I’ll surely listen to it quite often. There’s everything what should be in such music and proportion are right in my opinion. By the way, ULVEDHARR is crushing superstition that lyrics about Norse mythology or Vikings are domain of Black or Folk Metal and history belongs to Power Metal. Every old-school Metalhead should have this CD in her/his collection and that’s it!