Tiamtü / Tiamtu

Like most "legendary" Scandinavian black metal bands that no one outside the movement's innermost dungeons has ever heard of, Sweden's Ofermod capped over a decade of extremely sporadic activity ("activity" that yielded a truly "legendary" sum of just four songs!) with a by now quite unexpected full-length album named Tiamtü (2008), boasting all of the necro-black metal characteristics one would expect. And then some, since surprisingly slow offerings like the opening title track and "Death Cantata" are a shock to the system, even if a rather boring sort of shock, since they merely drag along like blackened doom dirges, casting no discernible emotion aside from, possibly, despair, and primarily on the listener's part at that! Luckily, the terrible twosome of vocalist Nebiros and multi-instrumentalist Michayah (only recently released from jail!) duly embark on a few riskier and more satisfying sonic endeavors like the stutter-riffed "Dreaming in the Veins of Kingu," the percussive interlude "Tophetian Cleansing: Furnace of Moloch," and the morbid soundtrack finale of "Maasseh Nechushtan." They also reveal their biggest strengths (if not much originality) in the glorious violence resplendent in such tracks as "Eu Angélion," "Khabs Am Pekht," and the especially spectacular "Pralayic Withdrawal," which convincingly accelerate to a far more adequate blastbeat barrage, while incrementing their intentionally raw style with nebulous melodic layers that ascend and descend with all the dramatic flair of vintage Emperor. The vocals remain predominantly coarse throughout and the lyrics suitably occult-ish, as per genre form, but the band does risk a few clean tones of miserable wailing amid the chaos of the last-mentioned song, which, although it doesn't even work all that well, definitely shows guts. And, at the end of the day, the album also shows enough songwriting variety that, although breaking no new ground and hardly "legendary" as advertised, it certainly leaves one wondering what kept Ofermod from recording a proper full-length earlier in their career.