Band:	Solbrud
Album:	Jærtegn
Style:	Atmospheric black metal
Release date:	September 2014

01. Sortedøden
02. Afbed
03. Klippemennesket
04. Ursult

Danish black metal somehow never became a big thing, taking into account that it's a Scandinavian country. The interesting question therefore is: what does it sound like? I will answer this first, for in the case of Solbrud it's quite easy as it's a mixture of Swedish and Norwegian black metal styles with some modern approaches. It has the lo-fi produced guitars and furious bass of Norway together with the death-metalish sounding drums and clearer vocals of Sweden. And to be honest, I could think of better mixtures.

Let's have a look at the new work Jærtegn. It only has four songs with an average length of about twelve minutes. The music is fast paced and uncompromising almost throughout the whole playing time. There are a few acoustic passages that blend in for a change but the album is still a full blast. This is enjoyable when one is in the mood for it, but although they are classified as atmospheric black metal, there's not much atmosphere coming up at any time. The main reason for this can be found in the overall sound, mostly in the drums department. They sound very aggressive but not so raw, e.g. like from a typical modern death metal album. While the electric guitars sound fine (just not fitting to the drums), the acoustic guitars could have been muddier and more alive as passages like the beginning of "Klippemennesket" sound plain and uninteresting.

Enough ranting today, as there is good stuff on Jærtegn. The album definitely has its moments, which mostly can be found in the middle two songs. There really are some good riffs that sound promising and lead to the assumption that the band is actually capable of doing better. Some of them I would even call awesome, but as a whole there are just too few of them. To conclude, Solbrud delivered a nice album which unfortunately loses most of its potential in production and filler riffs. Jærtegn can be fun listening to, but it lacks most of the features that would classify it as an outstanding album.