More than 20 years into their career, Irish metallers Primordial are riding the crest of their greatest successes yet. Their 2007 full-length, To the Nameless Dead was the best album of that year and brought them not only their highest sales, but also the opportunity to tour North America for the first time as one of the head acts on the PaganFest, effectively placing them in a leadership role of the pagan metal movement. And deservedly so. Rooted in black metal (Metal Blade has reissued their earlier albums for anyone wishing to explore their formative works), Primordial’s sound is folk metal without the silliness or the costuming. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of drama in Primordial, but it comes from the music itself and the performance of frontman Alan “Nemtheanga” Averill, not from the antlers strewn about the stage. As I recall from seeing them on that tour, a trenchcoat and an Irish flag on one of the several guitar stacks was about as far as they went.

On that level, some of the material on their latest offering, Redemption at the Puritan’s Hand (also Metal Blade) could be seen as “playing it up.” Indeed, even the title lends itself to being taken as a reference to the band’s relatively newfound success on American shores – the US being the “puritan” in question – after so long toiling in obscurity. And with several of the earlier tracks especially featuring direct address from Averill to his audience in the lyrics – “Rise my brothers/Rise from your graves/No grave is deep enough/To keep us in chains” from memorable opener “No Grave Deep Enough” – and “I’ve told you once/I’ve told you a thousand times/No regrets/No remorse” from “Bloodied Yet Unbowed,” which is perhaps Primordial’s most explicit exploration of their own circumstances to date, one might call Redemption at the Puritan’s Hand their most crowd-conscious work yet. In the chorus of “No Grave Deep Enough” comes a genuine folk metal progression, which isn’t something they’ve actually done before (they’ve always been more Bathory than Skyclad), however much they’ve been saddled with that genre designation in reviews. I won’t call it a capitulation, because I don’t believe a band goes 20-plus years doing whatever the fuck they want and then gets a taste of mainstream metal success and suddenly abandons the ethic that got them there, but Primordial are a smart enough act to know what works for them, and on Redemption at the Puritan’s Hand, that’s exactly what they’re playing to. In a way, it’s meeting expectation in the songwriting, but there’s no question that Primordial are still engaging their followers on their own terms.

I had the opening guitar line of “Bloodied Yet Unbowed” in my head for days before I could place that it was Anathema’s “Underworld” I was being reminded of, and I find that after multiple listens, I’m still most drawn to “No Grave Deep Enough” of all eight of the mostly-extended tracks. Primordial’s tendency for extended instrumental breaks and long builds is nothing new by their seventh album, and as ever with their approach, the more you pay attention to Redemption at the Puritan’s Hand, the more you’re going to get out of it, particularly in the less outwardly rocking material (I hesitate to call it balladry, because it’s not that, it’s just not as intensely forward-moving as some of the other pieces of the record) on songs like “Lain with the Wolf,” the near-doom paced “The Mouth of Judas,” or the first half of “The Puritan’s Hand.” These songs counteract some of the “heavier” movements, the blackened metal of “God’s Old Snake” – which seems to echo some of the musical sentiments of “Traitor’s Gate” from To the Nameless Dead without having the same kind of adrenaline-soaked force behind it – the faster but still melodic “The Black Hundred,” and 9:21 closer “Death of the Gods,” which gets as much of its lasting power from the guitars of Ciáran MacUiliam and Micheál O’Floinn (the band is rounded out by bassist Pól MacAmlaigh and drummer Simon O’Laoghaire, both capable but largely overshadowed) as from Averill’s call to heretics and partisans, which doesn’t happen all the time either on Redemption at the Puritan’s Hand or elsewhere in the Primordial catalog. It’s usually Averill who carries the show dramatically, but in the finale here, he meets his match, and bows out with a spoken warning to his “people’s masters” to beware of what one assumes a popular uprising we should all be lucky enough to live to see, letting the instruments lead the way into the fadeout at the end of the song.

If you found yourself drawn to Primordial for the first time by To the Nameless Dead, there’s a lot about Redemption at the Puritan’s Hand that’s going to refresh your memory of what you might have forgotten in the ensuing four years between the two albums, which, even with all the high-profile touring in the interim, is still a long time for a band with building momentum to go from one release to the next. Their longer-term stylistic growth – toward melody, away from the more explicitly black metal – makes an important step here, in that I feel this is the first time Primordial have approached an offering with a prior conception of what their sound is to be. Aside from the added pressure of living up to fan expectation, which may or may not have weighed on them consciously, there’s no doubt in listening to Redemption at the Puritan’s Hand that Primordial knows what Primordial sounds like, and while that inevitably means a sacrifice of some of the freshness of their style no matter how hard they push themselves creatively, the intensity in some of these songs nonetheless indicates that the band are far from running out of steam, and instead, are stepping with booted force into the stately role their growing fanbase has bestowed on them and which they’ve long since deserved.

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Tags: Dublin, Ireland, Metal Blade, Primordial

This entry was posted on Monday, May 9th, 2011 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.