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Review: Darkthrone - Eternal Hails......
Darkthrone
www.facebook.com/Darkthroneofficial
Eternal Hails......

Label: Peaceville Records
Year released: 2021
Duration: 42:00
Tracks: 5
Genre: Heavy/Doom

Rating:
4.5/5


Review online: October 13, 2021
Reviewed by: Michel Renaud
Readers' Rating
How do you rate this release?

Rated 3.53/5 (70.67%) (15 Votes)
Review

Darkthrone have been taking us on a rollercoaster ride with the past several albums, pretty much breaking ties with the second-wave raw black metal that put them on the map and, basically, "trying stuff" while remaining "metal." Eternal Hails...... shows no sign of them breaking this new tradition and I'd say this is my favourite post black metal-era Darkthrone album, though it did take 3-4 listens before it started to click, and then I was in all the way.

The album clocks in at 42 minutes but contains only five songs, the shortest of which are both just over 7 minutes in length and the longest is just over 10. Strangely, I've found the album to feel longer than 42 minutes, and it probably has to do with the songs being on the long side. While normally it's a bad thing when I say that an album feels long, in this specific case it's a positive comment.

The album is doomy for the most part, very heavy with a hollow sound that really crushes. The guitars often sound quite old school, even heavy rock-ish but mostly just heavy, pounding with a lot of adventures in fast razor-sharp territory. Some guitar parts even remind me of Alice in Hell-era Annihilator. The vocals are similar to what we've heard on recent albums, clean but raspy and a little abrasive, with some bits here and there remind me of old Darkthrone. There's a lot of variety here, with lots of slow stuff but they also speed things up quite a bit on occasion with some really cool riffage. All of this is glued together by a dark, sombre and sometimes creepy, sometimes melancholic atmosphere.

I haven't been on board with all of Darkthrone's experimentation since they steered away from black metal so many years ago, but every album always had at least some songs that caught my ear. In this case, the whole album has been prompting me to press "Play" again and again after its 42 minutes had elapsed.

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