HORDE OF HEL – a band consisting of musicians of various Swedish Black and Death Metal bands is up to deliver the soundtrack for the end of mankind with their album Blodskam, a derivate of Black, Death, Industrial and Dark Ambient. Well, everybody can write that on an info-sheet. So let’s hear how they try to do this musically.
After a malicious and sinister intro HORDE OF HEL smash the listener’s ears with Leave Life Behind and Born Again Into Submission, two crushing and surprisingly recognizable Black Metal songs with mean and shredding riffing, machinegun-like double bass and massive industrial stomping. With Hail To Chaos HORDE OF HEL present a really great mixture of Dark Ambient and Industrial, layered with synth interludes, which give it a slightly eerie and futuristic feel. The following tracks The Glory Of Mass Muder and Dödens Era combine all yet presented styles and come along as great and mighty stomping Black Metal songs with twisted Dark Ambient and spoken word/sample passages and so creating a musical vision of deserted and destroyed cities of a soon-to-be post apocalyptic future.
After these brilliant first five songs HORDE OF HEL unfortunately don’t manage to hold Blodskam’s beginning high quality. The next three songs don’t fall really out of the alignment but they just don’t reach the former high level, whereas Domen Mot Människan starts quite promising but the built up dark tension vanishes to uselessness with the track’s last third consisting of dumb blast beats and a standard Black Metal sound.
However, after that HORDE OF HEL regain strength with the short but intensive ambient Blott Tivel & Skam, which nearly sounds like a second intro of Blodskam for the following tracks called Legacy Of Venegance and Ashborn, both, but especially the latter one, being great Black Industrial songs. Again shredding, crunchy riffs collide with machine-like Industrial beats and are supported by organs, bells and an eerie choir, altogether summoning an utterly bleak end-time atmosphere.
With the unexpected melodic but still cold and dark sounding Död, Naturens Val HORDE OF HEL offer yet another highlight of Blodskam. This slightly melancholic song is the perfect ending theme to the foregone destruction, soaring above the ruins, turning away and closing the chapter “mankind”.
So, apart from two or three not completely hitting songs, Blodskam is an amazing album. Despite all different styles which are brought together and all need room for themselves to unfold, HORDE OF HEL manage to let each song grow without sound overloaded and this alone is a small masterpiece for its own.