All Shall Fall

We Say...

Review by J. Edward Keyes

They've got the corpsepaint and the sickening grimaces and the ten-ton battleaxes, but unholy Nordic metallers Immortal have always skewed iconoclastic. For one thing, they once had the temerity to release an album with a white cover — a fact for which they still get shit from some of the genres more dogmatic followers. Where most of their peers hail Satan, Immortal are naturalists, holding that the apocalypse will arrive not when the gates of hell are loosed, but when Mother Nature finally has enough of us and decides to pummel us with floods and wildfires. And on All Shall Fall, their first record in seven years and — by some good distance — the best of the lot, Immortal demonstrate a fondness for thinking big.

Indeed what's most notable about All Shall Fall is its swagger. Its seven songs take broad, vicious swipes, favoring chords that swoop down strong and steady instead of the usual black metal jackhammer. There's an odd brightness to the driving title track, Abbath's expansive riffing endlessly hammered by Horgh's impossible hailstorm drumming. In the almost-decade since the rightly-acclaimed Sons of Northern Darkness, Abbath's voice has grown hoarser and viler, and he croaks out his apocalyptic proclamations with menacing severity. He's almost singing in the magnificent "Norden On Fire," grunting dire verse over riffery as blinding as a blizzard.

But don't think this is just thunder and croak: part of what makes All Shall Fall so alluring is the fact that the group has written songs with actual sections and passages. "The Rise of Darkness" forgoes the death-hammer in favor of decidedly melodic chord changes, strange, unsettling minor chords that align the song as closely with punk rock as with black metal. "All Shall Fall" stops exactly halfway through for a bout of ominous, ballad-like fingerpicking, grinding first into kind of sickening chug before resuming its proper velocity. And "Norden on Fire" dares to open with a run of acoustic guitars before igniting full-on (those guitars come back later in the song, and Abbath's hellish growl sounds positively chilling against them). It's touches like these that indicate a deeper aesthetic at work on All Shall Fall, one that's just as bored with genre conventions as it is with our own penchant for self-immolation. Even their underlying message smacks of strange humanitarianism: isn't it more realistic to warn of a self-inflicted Armageddon rather than one brought about by cartoon demons? In an age of by-the-book ghouls, Immortal care enough to say "we're doomed."