”Immortal Pride” is the latest, fourth, full-length album from Polish pagan/black metal band Graveland. It was known from statements before this album’s appearance that Darken will be doing a kind of Bathory tribute, but the two previous albums were more or less Bathory too, so at least I didn’t know what to expect. From someone who heard an advance of this, I heard that it’s epic to the level of Conan the Barbarian soundtrack but that wasn’t exactly true.

Epic this is, but I don’t think this is effective. Darken has extended his compositions to even double the length of what they were in ”Following the Voice of Blood” and I called those songs slow and contemplative! I had a real fear of lethargy when I noticed that this album has four tracks, including intro and outro, with the two ”actual” songs each lasting for 20 minutes. Well, luckily the eventfulness of these songs was greater than in ”Following…” and even with these song lengths, this material sounds less minimalistic than most of Graveland’s work.

So, Capricornus is playing catchy Bathory-like travel-tempos and Darken is conjuring up vistas of vaaaaast landscapes by playing slow, heavy melodic passages half of which could be by Bathory, half of which could be from the previous Graveland album, folk/rock that is. Alongside his usual angry snarls threatening bodily harm to christians, Darken sings melodic clean ”oo-oo” passages the way (guess who!?) Quorthon used to do and everyone used to like. Darken goes also off-key regularly but that is the least of his problems on this album.

The major problems in this album are that it is not epic enough to blow the head off, it does not introduce anything to metal that ”Hammerheart” or ”Following the Voice of Blood” wouldn’t have, it does not sound very serious, it does not actually sound like anything except entertainment music! Fuck, I actually hate this album! This is for the people who like to listen to viking rock and drink beer and complain about niggers taking away all their jobs OR this is for the complete idiots who like the ”epic viking sound” but do not even complain about the niggers, rather accept their society and like to compromise everything. Oh yes, the outro is an incompetent keyboard rendition of ”Thurisaz” from the previous album.

This isn’t the worst album I’ve heard in 1999 (at least new Burzum, Summoning and Dodheimsgard are worse!) but this isn’t Graveland either. From some other band I could take this album as an ”ok Bathory tribute”, but from Graveland this is a disappointment.

© 1999 black hate