Band:	Ragnarok
Album:	Malediction
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	October 2012

01. Blood Of Saints
02. Demon In My View
03. Necromantic Summoning Ritual
04. Divide Et Impera
05. (Dolce Et Decorum Est) Pro Patria Mori
06. Dystocratic
07. Iron Cross - Posthumous
08. The Elevenfold Seal
09. Fade Into Obscurity
10. Sword Of Damocles
11. Retribution [vinyl bonus]

With a pretty absurd number of black metal acts clawing about at the moment, "tried and trve" can just as easily be read as "trve and tired." Fenriz calls them "the myriads." Which translates to me as "groups who take the 2nd wave formula, use and abuse it, and contribute little or nothing new-sounding to it."

Ragnarok have been around since '94, but released the bulk of their material after 2000. That, based on the type of BM I'm hearing on this thing, makes them a "myriads" band. They almost strictly play heard-it-before stuff. And they look like this. Without hearing their previous albums, I'll bet your first guess as to what they sound like is damn near spot-on.

Basically the only thing bands who do what's been done before... and done again... and again... then done again... can do to make their stuff worth checking out is play it really fucking well. Which, to an extent, these guys do. This is an album full of technically proficient, fairly hard-hitting, melodic-ish, evil-sounding sonic blackness. At its best it sounds a bit like a Taake disc (especially in the stand-out track "Necromantic Summoning Ritual"), just with less sense of ingenuity and less banjo, with a fair bit of 1349 thrown in. It's always solid, it just never really sounds more than just solid. The drumming comes away stealing the show, with a few excellent riffs scattered here and there, but the vast majority of this is only a little better than meh.