Fans of vast, sprawling post-doom gather yourselves. It’s time to contemplate the universe and your place in it. For me, it’s simple really. You, my friend, are merely a tiny speck of organic detritus on this blue orb which is itself an insignificant blob floating in the vastness of space: a globule of flying moisture from a giant intergalactic sneeze. But, for Seidr, things are very different. These wyrd-weavers see the universe and everything in it through the eyes of the ancients, where each of us holds a key to the magic spell – like a single note in the cosmic canvas of an album as it becomes absorbed in the vast swirling sonic maelstrom. It takes time to contemplate such complexities and Seidr have given us exactly that. At 89 minutes long, Ginnungagap gives us time to ponder just about anything you had on your agenda. As long as it’s the meaning of existence.
Seidr have already attracted a decent amount of praise for their Cosmic demo and their debut full-length For Winter Fire, which showed considerable restraint at just 74 minutes. Drone-soaked, spacey, doom metal with a folk edge, although the latter as much in spirit as in sound (except on tracks like ‘A Vision From Hlidskjalf’ where the traditional Viking metal elements seep in). It was both crushing and melodic at the same time, making for an intense journey that tried to unlock the door into a magic-tainted, Old Norse belief system. As it turns out, For Winter Fire was really just a warm-up session for their second full-length work. Ginnungagap is much more measured, tempered by some long ambient sections and repetitive doom riffs bordering on the psychedelic. It’s not exactly for the faint of heart. At first it struck me as incredibly protracted and overlong. Not the easiest band to digest, I thought, but as protracted and overlong seems to be my bag at the moment I dug in and tried to let the spell take hold. My perseverance paid off. Ginnungagap is slower to build than its predecessor with those seemingly infinite, more contemplative moments of droning noise. But the band plug on regardless and eventually it does what it is supposed to, focusing the sound into a fine point when the full force is unleashed. When it gathers together all the elements in full effect this album rises and rages like some primordial, cosmic storm combining the full weight of some mighty riffage, huge death metal vocals and those drums… Odin’s beard, those drums.
In Old Norse the Ginnungagap was a giant, magic-filled gap in the earth with the power of creation. It’s probably better thought of as the centre of the universe but was probably recognised as something much more real: a hole in the earth somewhere off the Atlantic Ocean. North American quartet Seidr (itself a word for an everyday form of Norse witchcraft) are on a mission to evoke the power within the gap and drag you right down inside. The album’s opener A Blink Of The Cosmic Eye carefully prises open the thin films of reality with some gently rising, reverberating guitars. But soon enough those drums are taking on a life of their own – driving and purposeful, at times seemingly possessed by the spirit of that most marvellous of percussionists John Bonham. Each of the four rides the waves of Ginnungagap as they rise and descend, biding their time and carried along by some of the throbbing rhythm before Seidr find themselves in the centre of the miasma they have created.
The self-belief involved in even embarking on something like this is impressive. Albums like this always border on the self-indulgent for a start, and I have laid to rest similar albums on that very basis after a fair amount of inner turmoil or even sometimes before I’ve even started. I don’t mind being the audience to someone else’s personal ego trip – or pagan crusade – but it had better be good. The album moves along, apparently without constraints, pulling in ambient sounds and bending it all to their will in such a way that I would happily have sat through another 90 minutes. Staying within some important and self-imposed boundaries and well away from any temptation into the realms of the progressive. They switch from the sprawling landscapes to tightened fury without ever losing their pace or the urgency of the journey they’re on. The title track is a great example of the effortlessness with which they shift between sounds within the tracks and shows what they’re capable of – a pulsing 17 minute spell that just seems to suspend time and ends all too soon.
It’s an ambitious project, but one which they have more or less pulled off – as fans of the Cosmic demo or the For Winter Fire debut would have probably guessed they would. Both of those were great albums but it turns out this is where they were heading all along.
(8.5/10 Reverend Darkstanley)
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