“Monolith” is Drottnar’s third album release, but this hides the fact that the Norwegians have been together for over 20 years, initially as a death metal band before turning to Viking Black metal and in the last 15 years a form of technical black metal.
Very effective it is too. There’s no escaping the fact that there’s a ring of old style black metal, but what defines the sound of Drottnar is its obscurity. It’s echoey and expansive, and always ready to deviate and take off in the darkest direction. “Funeral of Funerals” and “Aphelion” are utterly grim but don’t descend into themselves in self-pity. They are morbid, harsh and cold by nature but the technical progressions serve to highlight the withering contempt that comes out of these dark pieces. “Subterranean Sun” has that why-am-I-wasting-my-time-playing-this-to-you black metal feel, but its deviations and excursions down dismal alleys make the dark scene even darker. It’s fierce, harsh and deadly. “Axiom” and “Charagma”, which follow, are more fiery in nature and amount to a technical depictions of destruction, death and misanthropy. “Charagma” is strange, as it seems to end and doesn’t, finding a new lease of life in a stifling environment where there is harshness but ironically no life. On it ploughs remorselessly like systematic destruction. “Pestleid” is its essence, while the title track lives up to its weighty name. Strangely, the album finishes on an epic, almost Viking note, but this isn’t reflective of the atmosphere that has gone before it.
In the end, the message and the imagery became uniform for me, but there’s no doubting the intensity and the skill of the technical twists and turns that make this an utterly relentless work of black metal grimness.
(7/10 Andrew Doherty)
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