Horndal - Lake Drinker review
| Band: | Horndal |
| Album: | Lake Drinker |
| Style: | Post hardcore, Sludge metal |
| Release date: | April 2021 |
01. Rossen
02. Horndal's Blodbad
03. The Uprising
04. The Black Wheel
05. Kalhygget
06. Ruhr
07. Growing Graves
08. Home
09. Thor Bear
10. Town Burner
11. Ormön
Time for some rusty metal for the hopeless generations forced to see the natural resources being sucked dry by big corp. Time for an ode to post-industrial towns that were drained, pillaged and raped, and then were left to ruin when they had nothing more to give.
Horndal is a small Swedish town that also happens to be the hometown of guitarist/vocalist Henrik Levahn and his younger brother, drummer Pontus Levahn. Hence Horndal, the band.
The three people reading my reviews know that I am sucker for interesting stories complementing my metal. The theme of Horndal's debut, Remains, was the abandonment and subsequent decline of their hometown when the steel mill that had employed local workers for decades shut down just before the '80s. Fast-forward to 2017, when Google offered hope for the local economy and for the rebirth of the area by announcing that they had purchased land in Horndal in view of using it as a potential data centre. A wolf in sheep's clothing, you say? Damn right. The server farm remains empty to this day but the location has been deforested anyway, despite the fact that it has not been decided yet if Google is going to use it or not. If it does kick off in the end, there is going to be a big need for water to cool those servers and the idea is to take it from the local lake, Rossen. Hence Lake Drinker, the album.
Lake Rossen gives its name to the album's opening track, which is a full-on sludge assault but with a thrashy, South Of Heaven-like twist. Horndal sound like High On Fire and Mastodon jamming with Slayer, Entombed, and Discharge. This is the best description I can come up with to give you an idea of the band's 'deathened' sludge hammering, thrash aggression, and punk attitude. Lake Drinker is a very riffy affair, mostly mid-tempo, and with melody often coming in the form of clean guitar passages; "Horndal's Blodbad", "The Black Wheel", and "Ruhr" are the ones that use these more memorably. The instrumental "Home" is a very nice acoustic interlude and along with "Thor Bear" which succeeds it, they have recordings of local protesters mixed in with the music.
As much as I loved blasting "Kalhygget", with its great mix of quicker d-beat pounding and heavier thrash stomp, my two favourite tracks are "Growing Graves" and "Town Burner". Both feature a heavier presence of lead guitar compared to the rest of the album, with the former being insanely groovy and the latter being a total barn burner with a post-punk edge. The whole album is a real banger though, it is riff town from start to finish with massive drums.
Lake Drinker is among the best sludge you're going to get this year. Urban decay is available over here.
"We bow our heads
You want, we'll make
First you took our trees
Now you drink our lake"
 | Written on 07.05.2021 by Only way to feel the noise is when it's good and loud! |
Comments
Comments: 9
Visited by: 65 users
| LordFezzington Lost To Apathy Posts: 390  |
Listened to the first few tracks of this a few weeks back and was so impressed I decided to save a full listen until I'd bought it properly. Then promptly forgot about it. So as one of the three people reading this that you cite, thank you for reminding me of its awesomeness. To Bandcamp!
---- "Pay no heed to anyone and do what seems right to yourself." - Franz Kafka, The Trial 2022 List: https://metalstorm.net/users/list.php?list_id=7001 2021 List: https://metalstorm.net/users/list.php?list_id=6742
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| musclassia Staff Posts: 7041  |
Written by LordFezzington on 07.05.2021 at 18:41 I haven't forgotten about giving it a relisten, I just haven't found the time yet. But yeah, it's a very solid fun release
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| Nejde CommunityManager Moderator Posts: 1473  |
"The three people reading my reviews know that I am sucker for interesting stories complementing my metal." I also like when a band actually has something to say. I already new the backstory but still a very good and interesting review. This is a great album and a great band so it's nice to see them get some recognition. So here's some more information for the interested: In "Home" there's a part of an actual interview at the end where a man speaks about how the townspeople built a black coffin and then did a protest march from the sawmill to "The Square". A week later they were notified that the factory also would shut down. He finishes by saying that it was what finally broke the whole town, that it was the straw that ultimately broke the camel's back ( in Swedish the saying is 'the drop that made the cup overflow')
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| nikarg Staff Posts: 7047  |
Written by Nejde on 07.05.2021 at 20:59 In Greek too  Some more related info for those interested: The residents of Horndal responded to the closure of the steel mill with protests, even staging a play in which "the Devil came to this little city and took all the money and closed down the steel mill and left the city to die". The Levahn brothers' dad, a local schoolteacher, acted the role of the Devil in that play. On "Home" the protester who speaks is Anders 'Buffalo' Eriksson. He was arrested at a confrontation with then-Prime Minister Torbjörn Fälldin, interrogated by the Swedish security police, and had his passport revoked for ten years. Nejde, did you know this story before you heard about the band? Is it widely known in Sweden?
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| Nejde CommunityManager Moderator Posts: 1473 |
Written by nikarg on 07.05.2021 at 21:11 I did not. Found out about the town of Horndal when I discovered the band when I first heard Remains. And my guess is that the story of Horndal specifically isn't known. Hundreds of years back smaller towns were built around a mill or a factory and most of the townspeople worked there. They usually made steel, paper or glass. With the industrialization in the 1800's the demand increased and the companies changed their production methods and thus moved to bigger cities and built bigger factories, leaving the townspeople unemployed and literally killing the whole town. This is called bruksdöden in Swedish which translates to something like the factory town death in English. This era ended more or less in the late 70's, early 80's so Horndal would've have been one of the last towns that suffered bruksdöden. This stuff is taught in school when we learn about Swedish history but for me that was 25-30 years ago when I was 10-15 years old so I actually had to Google some of it to remind myself. Also I'm no historian but I tried to be as accurate as possible although my version is very compressed. So if I got some stuff wrong I apologize but hopefully you understand
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| nikarg Staff Posts: 7047 |
Written by Nejde on 07.05.2021 at 23:59 No worries, man, and thanks for the info. I have to use Google a lot too because I also tend to forget things, maybe because  I really enjoyed reviewing this album not only because of how good music there is in it, but also because it intrigued me to read more on the subject. Apparently, there are places like this everywhere, in the USA they call them the Rust Belt cities.
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| Nejde CommunityManager Moderator Posts: 1473 |
Written by nikarg on 08.05.2021 at 01:10 I really enjoy concept albums and even more so if they're anchored in reality. You get the feeling that a band put way more thought into their music if they have an interesting story to tell too. One album that comes to mind is Whitechapel's debut The Somatic Defilement about Jack The Ripper which also contains an excerpt from a Jeffrey Dahmer interview in the intro track. It actually made me read up on both Jack The Ripper and Dahmer to learn more than I already knew. What I like about Horndal is that they teach you about a little piece of Swedish history and quite a big bit about their hometown. This would seem more interesting to a Swede but as you mentioned people suffer the same consequences in the US for example so the theme is quite universal. Luckily for the interested they only sing in English even though some song titles are in Swedish.
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| MarlKarx Posts: 63  |
I really dug this album. It's got this really heavy and sad atmosphere that really encapsulates what they're speaking about.
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| tintinb Posts: 1814 |
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