Originally written by Ryan Plunkett
Ancient Rites is a band that has been playing extreme metal for more than 10 years now. They’ve gone through quite a few hardships during this time, like losing a founding member of the band, but they have persevered. They’ve been around nearly since the conception of black metal and helped spread the music throughout Europe by actually touring, unlike other bands from the early scene like Darkthrone and Emperor that never seemed to play live.
Ancient Rites has neo classical, melodic and symphonic elements added to their brand of blackened metal. The guitar work is pretty cool; you’re given some straightforward black metal riffs, but there’s also some really cool melodic and brutal stuff found in here, not to mention some cool solos. The drums are good and sound really crisp. The keyboards are cool, and I love the piano work found in this album. When combined with some great keyboards, it feels very atmospheric and I found myself playing “The Return” and “Remembrance” over and over just to listen to it. It’s some of my favorite material off the album.
As I come to the vokills this brings me to my first complaint with the album. I like the harsh vokills, but I’m not a big fan of the clean stuff. There are songs where they don’t bother me as much like in “(Ode to Ancient) Europa”, but then there are songs like “North Sea” and “Exile (Les Litanes De Satan)” where they just really annoyed me. They’re one of the main reasons I won’t be breaking this album back out as often.
The production is pretty solid, but still maintains a bit of that raw black metal feel, which never diminishes some of the epic-ness emitted from the album. The lyrics tend to deal with that of many Viking metal bands: stuff about Odin and Valhalla. They’re pretty decent.
When it comes down to it, this album was enjoyable, and I recommend at least checking it out.
