Band:	Primordial
Album:	Where Greater Men Have Fallen
Style:	Black metal, Celtic folk metal
Release date:	November 21, 2014
A review by:	ScreamingSteelUS

01. Where Greater Men Have Fallen
02. Babel's Tower
03. Come The Flood
04. The Seed Of Tyrants
05. Ghosts Of The Charnel House
06. The Alchemist's Head
07. Born To Night
08. Wield Lightning To Split The Sun

Primordial once more return to power with the somber grandeur that has served them so well these many years. Most bands tend to attract some kind of criticism for returning to the same sound from album to album without exploring it further or evolving it to any meaningful degree, but few bands have ever crafted a style as unfathomably deep and rich in texture as Primordial; Where Greater Men Have Fallen soars beyond the reach of such petty and feeble barbs.

Where Greater Men Have Fallen carries on Primordial's roundabout way of accruing a Celtic aura - not drawing explicitly from their native musical traditions, but nonetheless steeped in antediluvian earthiness that ties them inextricably to the folk aesthetic. Primordial stands like a weatherbeaten mountain: wind-whipped raw and trodden by countless eons' worth of pilgrims, serving as a focal point for the energy that connects man to nature. Nemtheanga's haggard, prophetic voice roars across the stormy tempest of rainswept riffs and howls with bleak emotion; his wretched cries become especially powerful on the emotional "Babel's Tower."

As it happens, Where Greater Men Have Fallen does play host to a new sort of Primordial song, in the form of the thoroughly doom-laden "Ghosts Of The Charnel House." If anything, this magnificent track sounds as though it belongs with Nemtheanga's and Sol Dubh's new project, Dread Sovereign, and I can easily hear them howling "Cathars To Their Doom" alongside it. But for the most part, this album is the same band that brought us To The Nameless Dead and The Gathering Wilderness. From the voluminously grim churning of the title track to the tense, ominous buildup that consumes nearly half of "Born To Night," the blackened vastness of their sound crashes like an endless wave of archaic force.

It would be putridly crass of me to describe such a dramatic, multifaceted work of art as "kickass," but Where Greater Men Have Fallen totally kicks ass, lads. I have found it both more readily accessible and more powerful than its predecessor, Redemption At The Puritan's Hand, but pitting Primordial albums against each other seems like splitting hairs to the most pointless degree. This latest masterpiece finds the Irish masters of sobering epics firmly-ensconced in their home turf, and as always, after the album ends the Earth feels about a thousand years older.