Ihsahn - Angl

\r\n   So, the time has come and the frontman of the once mighty Emperor is releasing his second solo album "Angl". His previous release "The Adversary" featured Ihsahn’s return to the symphonic black metal, after his avant-gard trips with his wife’s project Peccatum, although with many progressive and melodic elements and a much larger diversity and experimentation even from the latest Emperor musical escapades. And "Angl", of course, follows the same patterns.
\r\n   With a line up consisting of Asgeir Mickelson (drums) and the new addition of Lars Norberg (bass) both in Spiral Architect and a guest vocal performance from Opeth frontman Mikael Εkerfeldt, "Angl" delivers for the most part a mixture of symphonic black metal combined with an emotional progressive metal with clean acoustic guitars, piano interludes and some Euro-death influences.
\r\n   If you happened to listen to the previous album then you know what to expect here since there aren’t any significant differences. I admit that I didn’t like that album and even though I really tried to approach it with a very open-minded look (and openmindeness is a very hard thing for me to do)I thought it was really overrated. The same goes with this one too. Except a couple of songs ("Misanthrope" - what a great song!!- and "Malediction") that produced a pleasurable vibration to my Emperor ears, both with a driving rhythm and a delightful riffage as well as an epic atmosphere, the rest were just a boring and annoying experience. Average to indifferent songs that I suppose they were aimed to showcase Ihsahn’s capability in songwriting progressive, sophisticated songs and I don’t doubt about his songwriting skills but I really believe he can do better that that. His guitar work is really good, maybe greater that the previous album but the inspiration seems incomplete somehow with a useless masturbatory performance at times. His black/death metal voice is great as ever but his clean vocals were really indigestible messing up at times even more the whole output ("Alchemist"), just compare it with Åkerfeldt’s clean parts in "Unhealer" and by the way their interaction of death growls, black shrieks is the only true highlight in this album.
\r\n   The truth is that I got so bored the first time I listened to this album that I was very skeptical when I listened to it again and I even forced myself for some further hearings.  The black metal parts are great even more if compared to the rest of the stuff but the prog, jazz experimental fusions with some exceptions ("Elevator", "Threnody") are somehow pointless and even spoiling tracks that otherwise could have been better ("Scarab", "Emancipation", "Monolith").
\r\n   Well, I think it’s time to finish this review because I get the feeling that it is getting more and more subjective. I don’t know if I suffer from a huge black metal syndrome or artists like these (the name Tom Warrior rings any bell??) after a couple of years releasing masterpieces in a specific genre suffer from the syndrome ‘I wanna the most open minded musician’. So judge by yourselves and leave me alone with my early-Emperor bliss!!! \r\n

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\r\nVaso Prassa \r\n

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