Kvelertak
Nattesferd

Norwegian Kvelertak has been very successful with their first two albums winning awards and collecting praise from all over the world, their latest album Meir was very well received by us here at Hallowed receiving six points so there were some hope for more greatness when this record hit our record players. This new album does have a less interesting artwork than the previous album, but when the vocalist of the band claims that this is their best album to date I want to believe him especially considering how good their last album was. That also gives an angle to this album: is the vocalist correct in his claim?

He is correct in the fact that I think that this is probably their best production to date, their sound is good and stylewise they are playing in the same region as their previous album. Aggression mixed with melody, growls and stuff combined with more melodic approaches is probably the best way to describe how this sound. The vocals are mainly growled or screamed, kind of puts a damper on the sense of variation seen with the guitars, drums and all of that – growly vocals always tend to make an album feel a little bit static. Nine tracks and just a bit short of fifty minutes is what we get from this album, and as I stated it has good variation so I doubt it will make you tired of it. With this strong production it has to be better than the previous album, right? Well, it is looking good for the singer this far.

The songs on this album are good; all nine of them work well. The sound might be a small step forward compared with the previous album but the songs aren’t, they just are not as good as what we heard about three years ago. Kind of a disappointment if I had expected them to do something as good as before but I don’t really care to expect anything so it is what it is but it kind of feels like they could have done better. The vocals is something of a weak point for this band, I think they should try and expand their vocal prowess to something less growly and screamy to add a bit more depth and dynamics to the album. I am however quite sure that many fans and internet reviewers will have many superlatives to say about this album, and they wouldn’t be all wrong as I don’t think anyone will be overly disappointed if getting this album.

I would claim that the vocalist is a little incorrect in his claim, Meir was a better album and in my view this album is not really even close to that. The nine tracks on the album are all quite good but I think the album ends much better than it starts and that the ending track on the album is the best one. The album itself works pretty well but this band has done better and this isn’t even close to being one of the better albums of 2016, so it could be described as something of a disappointment but in the end I still think that it is a pretty good album.

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