Band:	Iotunn
Album:	Access All Worlds
Style:	Melodic death metal, Progressive metal
Release date:	February 26, 2021
A review by:	RaduP

01. Voyage Of The Garganey I
02. Access All Worlds
03. Laihem's Golden Pits
04. Waves Below
05. The Tower Of Cosmic Nihility
06. The Weaver System
07. Safe Across The Endless Night

Hamferð keeps invading progressive metal bands. It happened to Barren Earth, it happened to Iotunn. It could be your progressive metal band next. You've been warned!

Of course two cases is far too few to establish a pattern, but I needed something wacky for the attention grabber. And it's not Hamferð as much as just Hamferð's vocalist, Jón Aldará, admittedly one of my favorite vocalists. My first reaction when stumbling upon Iotunn was "Holy shit! Jon Aldara in a power metal band?!". That was a bit quelled when I did listen to Access All Worlds and surprise: it's not a power metal record. A look through the album's comment section shows that people also realized that. One listen to the band's debut EP and only other release, The Wizard Falls did clear up some waters as to why Iotunn were tagged as such, but even that one isn't that much of a power metal record. Benjamin Jensen's vocals were a bit more on the power metal spectrum, but he used harsh vocals on the album as well, so the jump isn't that big.

Don't jump ship yet, if you were excited for a Jón Aldará power metal record, for two reasons: there's still bits of power metal, but very very little; and second: why would you want a power metal record when you already have a progressive/melodeath record and it still has Jón Aldará? I will give you, right off the bat, the biggest red flag. There's been very few records where the production was as frustratingly bad as it is here. I do listen to a lot of stuff with "bad" production, but it's usually stuff that is either experimental or has a reduced budget. How the hell does a legendary producer like Fredrik Nordström, who has produced such albums as At The Gates's Slaughter Of The Soul, Opeth's Blackwater Park or Dark Tranquillity's The Gallery among a huge list of other classics, miss the mark so much? I generally don't mind what people call "the loudness wars", but Fredrik screwed the mix so bad that what could've been an amazing display of progressive songwriting and epic cosmic metal sounds like an annoying blob of crippled noises that resemble metal. What did Iotunn ever do to you?

Of course it's an exaggeration, but only because no album in recent memory frustrated me this badly with its production since Khôrada's Salt, ironically also done by a veteran producer. But that felt challenging. This feels... empty. It feels like keeping an ice cream that smells so good just out of arms reach. Because the twin guitar attack keeps pumping out grandiose melodies that somehow perfectly fill up the hourlong runtime without ever not feeling vital, by taking cues from power, death and black metal, and keeping the prog just within reach of how technically complex it is. Because Jon's vocals easily go from melodramatic cleans repurposed from doom metal, to throaty blackened shrieks to meaty growls, always soaring no matter the register. Because, with a progressive space metal that channels Borknagar, Arcturus, Scar Symmetry more than the Barren Earth I would've expected it to sound like given the Jon connection, it sounds like the sweeping kind that feels comfortable with its foot on the throttle. And I can't properly taste it because Fredrik decided to brick the goddamn master.

Production aside, this is an album where the songwriting and the performance clearly plays on its strengths. Adventurous in the right ways without pushing it, focusing more on finding the right cues for the right moments rather than experimenting for the sake of it. Very few albums can maintain this grandiose atmosphere without falling flat or feeling cheesy.