PRIMORDIAL - To The Nameless Dead

"To the Nameless Dead is by far the band’s heaviest work, not as distinctly black metal by the genre’s book, and not as openly and overtly Celtic. Yet, Primordial is the band which is so honest with themselves they play what is on their minds at this very moment, and they do not need any flutes or tin-whistles for you to know that they hail from the Emerald Isle.

The album is a stunning in-and-out of melody whirlwind, climbing the highs and scraping the lows, touching on very serious personal and nation-defining issues, leaving a glimmer of hope for both a single person and the collective people. To borrow an explanation from the vocalist A.A. Nemtheanga, if The Gathering Wilderness was impenetrably bleak, To the Nameless Dead leaves us all the last fighting chance, which only fools would fail to grasp.

Every song on the album is a vortex, songwriting at its most impeccable, without beat up verse-chorus-verse structure. You can listen to the album as a whole, compositions flowing one into another, or you can pick them randomly, one at a time, and I guarantee you will want to hear more of them. Heathen Tribes has an undeniable pagan rhythmic meter, the band reciting the travels they have been on throughout their existence. Failures Burden and Empire Falls take a little bit of time to get going and culminate with spectacular swirling leads. As Rome Burns is a lesson awaiting all unsuspecting and arrogant empires, pressed on with Eastern melodic overtones and barbaric beat of slaves risen from under oppression. Gallows Hymn opens up with the bass intro borrowing heavily from Moonlight Sonata and, so it seems to me, the whole song unfolds in accord with Beethoven’s magnificent opus. Only Traitors Gate has black metal blastbeat, appropriate and mesmerizing at the same time. After this outburst No Nation on This Earth grinds and grooves the album into closure, but as you already know I have this masterpiece on continuous play.

A.A. Nemtheanga certainly has his strongest performance ever, pushed to the limit by Chris Fielding who has created a production, both rustic and modern wall-of-sound at the same time. The vocals on To the Nameless Dead are a wonderful mixture of clean, but edgy, British/Irish doom and avantgarde Norse black metal, full of passion, melancholy, despair, defiance and hope at the same time. Within one quick instance he goes from mellow into the ripping, soul shattering experience making you clench your teeth and grip the shirt. The band, as a whole, have spent together so much time, and refined their instrumental skills to the point that Primordial is now a perfect unison, the players understanding each other with unspoken bond.

And if the massiveness of To the Nameless Dead will not get you musically, then pour into the album’s lyrics, deep reflections on the stories of what constitutes a nation, and what price is to be paid for that, not to mention more personal soul-searching expressions. It looks as if the pile on my desk will spend more time sitting idle, that dust growing thicker." - Metal Reviews