There’s something heartwarming about a story of persistence and evolution paying off. Too often it feels like a band’s worth is decided swiftly and it’s good to see that doesn’t always have to be true. Krigsgrav‘s decision to incorporate a death doom element to their atmospheric black metal made them one of those success stories with Fires in the Fall. Now two years have passed and we get to see where the continued journey takes them with Stormcaller, an album that’s got the winds of expectation blowing around it.
I have listed this album as melodic black metal, but a truer description would be metal salad. Stormcaller jumps from genre to genre as the mood takes it, and it is highly impressive how seamless those jumps are. Opening track “Huntress of the Fire Caller” is as good an example as any – opening with meloblack, before going to more doom-death, then straight black metal, then what feels like straight melodeath – but every song has a similar story. Many of the tracks trend to one end of the sound. “Stormcaller” is mostly black metal, “Bay of the Barghest” is mostly doom-death, and there’s even some folk vibes “The Tonic of Wilderness”. All of the songs roam across all of the soundscape though. The result is that Stormcaller is by turns ferocious, melodic, wistful, fist-pumping, and always entertaining.
This would be heading for end-of-year listing without a doubt if it wasn’t for two big flaws. The first is that Krigsgrav have kept the atmoblack penchant for long, resulting in meandering songs that lack climactic moments. The music isn’t atmospheric enough to carry that, save on “Twilight Fell”, and I’d love to see Krigsgrav adopt a more straight-forward approach to song writing. The second flaw is that this production feels too muddy and lacking in punch. The drums are the main victim but I wish the guitar had more body and the vocals more prominence. I’d love it if Krigsgrav had adopted a cleaner, shinier production, or maybe got heavier and more punishing instead. Maybe if it wasn’t all so muddled together, I’d have found those big moments that bring a song together that I so desperately wanted, too. In other words, most of what still feels like atmoblack about Krigsgrav held Stormcaller back for me.
Evolution is a funny old thing, and opinions always differ on the quality of the relics it leaves behind. I like my body hair, but others wish they had a lot less or more. When it comes to the atmoblack heritage of Stormcaller, I find myself wishing for less or more as well. They’re that stray lump of gristle that takes an otherwise excellent salad from great to good. I’ll keep listening to Stormcaller as there’s too many good things going on here to ignore, but I will be wistful about what could have been with a punchier attitude from Krigsgrav for some time to come. Here’s to continued evolution.
