Website: Amon Amarth
Ahhh, the familiar red/black/yellow/flames covers. Unlike their power-metal counterparts, Sweden’s Amon Amarth has spent their long history performing folklore-ridden death metal while preserving the Scandinavian culture for youth and beyond. It’s viking metal for those who prefer to avoid noodly keyboard overzealotry and bombast. Though recording since 1996, 2002’s Versus the World marked a fantastic turn in quality for the band, and 2004’s Fate of Norns kept up that newfound direction and improving on it as well.
There’s not a lot that has changed on With Odin On Our Side; if you know the band at all, it’s exactly what you would expect to hear (and the album cover is exactly what you would expect to see). Crisp sounds, drum-intensive, solo-wailing, and growling vocals are par for the course, and Amon Amarth certainly have not backslid. Whether it’s an improvement on albums of past is debatable; “Runes To My Memory” ends with more emotion than one typically hears from the band, but the epic feel and instrumentation throughout the album are nothing new. This doesn’t mean “Hermod’s Ride to Hell” isn’t one of the better songs they’ve recorded, it simply means it’s among friends in the quality department.
It’s a wonderful thing that Amon Amarth has achieved such high quality, and even more wonderful that they continue to maintain that quality. Although it’s not entirely different from what they’ve done before, it’s still top-notch, with a few surprises peppered throughout to keep With Odin On Our Side in the must-purchase category for Scandinavian metal fans. If you’re just curious what all the fuss is about, this certainly isn’t a bad place to start learning.
