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Bloodaxe is, much to my surprise, a band hailing from Thunder Bay in northwestern Ontario, Canada, and so is the band’s label, White Legends Records. I wasn’t expecting any metal to come out of there, and even less expected was the Black Metal genre (although to some extent there’s some flirting with Viking/pagan metal.) The band’s leader is in fact a Norwegian-Canadian so that explains a few things right there. A musical base of comparison would be the early 90s BM scene, in the likes of Darkthrone, whose coldness, grim atmosphere and raw metal Bloodaxe seems to have found inspiration in. Beside a couple of acoustic intro/outro tracks that carry an uneasy feeling of grim solitude, the music here is overall pretty fast-paced, although there are a couple of much slower songs that I found to have an even darker mood to them, while the faster stuff depicts a much angrier, aggressive or even destructive feeling coming from the band. Ok it may sound like I’m stating the obvious here, but this is simply to emphasize the fact that those guys have got it right - it’s not every BM band out there that succeed in really making their feelings flow into the listener through their music, but Bloodaxe is I think one of those few. The vocals are pretty low in the mix and while some may see it as a production problem (...), for my part I think it just adds to the overall cold atmosphere of this album.

If that sounds like your kind of stuff, I highly recommend that you check out this band. See their web site for more information and/or to purchase the CD.