Band:	Abbath
Album:	Abbath
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	January 2016

01. To War!
02. Winterbane
03. Ashes Of The Damned
04. Ocean Of Wounds
05. Count The Dead
06. Fenrir Hunts
07. Root Of The Mountain
08. Endless
09. Riding On The Wind [Judas Priest cover] [bonus]
10. Nebular Ravens Winter [Immortal cover] [bonus]

Seven years and a blizzard of litigation have passed since we last heard the batrachoid gnarring of Immortal frontman and painty-faced Boston terrier Abbath. Amidst internal struggles and various controversies, what was supposed to be a glorious return to fame quickly descended into an uncomfortable mistake. Frolic at the heart of winter for too long and you're bound to catch cold.

Perhaps I have simply grown too accustomed to the so-raw-it-still-has-a-pulse school of black metal production, but Abbath sounds flatter than Kansas. I don't hear icy gales of bloody, frigid misanthropy; I hear a bunch of guys sitting in a studio cutting austere, dispassionate tracks and then going home before discussing how the cogs all fit together. This album feels as rushed, pressurized, and incohesive as the recording process and birth of the band itself must have been. Moreover, while many of the songs are conceptually compelling and could have razed mountains if recorded 15 years ago, Abbath's own dreary, sloppy performance robs tracks like "Ocean Of Wounds" and "Root Of The Mountain" of impact.

Contrary to the norm, it's the small touches that make Abbath worse than it needed to be. The acoustic guitars in "Winterbane" don't come through strongly enough to overtake the electric instruments and contribute something, but sound just absurd and twangy enough to be distracting. The symphonic effects, thankfully rarer than the "olds grandpas guitars," are more bloated and self-parodic than any Manowar album cover. It's a symphonic effect, really; the keyboards make only a single appearance in "Ashes Of The Damned" and are then recycled at the end of the song, raising questions as to why somebody brought his keyboard to the studio at all if it were only going to get used once (and improperly at that). The band even becomes Motörhead for the last 30 seconds or so of "Winterbane," a creative decision that is confusing, to say the least. As far as I'm concerned, the drums really keep this album afloat, though King seems to be doing some pretty interesting things on those occasions when his bass shows up in the mix.

Stylistically, Abbath seems to have made a mild departure from his former ways. We hear black metal in Abbath's trademark gurgling and the tremolo-picked, sometimes frosty riffs, but a lot of the album has the thicker, heavier, later-era-Immortal feeling that verges on death metal. The album generally feels distanced from Immortal otherwise in style and substance, with a number of mid-paced tracks incorporating elements of more standard heavy metal (even groove or thrash), and Abbath isn't even as heavy as, say, Sons Of Northern Darkness, leaving it in this awkward no man's land of stifling production, drastically varied performances, and uneven songwriting that confuses the album's true direction.

Abbath clearly believes that he is Immortal, having tried to take the name for himself, unilaterally retire the project, and then recreate the classic experience on his first solo album. Unfortunately, arrogant velleities aside, Abbath is not Immortal, at least not anymore, and neither he nor his music can seem to "Withstand The Fall Of Time."