EP REVIEW: Uråldrad – Bergsvriden
Bursting into life in 2013, and featuring core members from the folk metal act MIDVINTERBLOT, BERGSVRIDEN aren’t so much a side project for its three members, but more of an exploration of the darker, more sinister side of the music they craft with their main band. Decidedly more prolific, having produced three full-lengths in the last decade, the band’s style brings together heady folk elements and ties them to a much more angular brand of melodic black metal, with incredibly epic and abrasive results. Their latest EP, Uråldrad, shows the amount of consideration and imagination that goes into even shorter releases like this, with much of the music present here being more than worthy of one of their full-length albums.
Vi Kallar På – a short, haunting song built around acoustic guitars and piano – is a great start to this EP, setting an ominous and palpable tone right off the bat, and gradually introducing the harder elements rather than going straight for the jugular. Strandvaskaren takes the visceral black metal style of the previous song’s latter half and applies dancing melodies to the snarling vocals, grating rhythms and authoritative drumming. It’s got a sinister undercurrent, but there’s an energy and punchiness beneath the coarser elements and subtle discordance that makes this as catchy as it is fierce at various points.
Gråterskan, rather than opting for the blackened folk approach present on the preceding tracks, is a much more straight forward black metal offering, with biting, tremolo-picked riffs, frenetic drums and searing vocal deliveries which all lend this a sharp and caustic side whilst retaining the spirited performances and bombastic edge that made the first two tracks so impressive. Rådavisan is another brief but brilliant acoustic piece that serves as an instrumental segue that really allows the folk components at the core of the band’s sound to come to the forefront, with accordions underpinning the crystalline nature of the guitars.
Hultaskogens Häxa veers abruptly in the opposite direction, coupling blistering, rabid guitar lines with equally punishing percussion and bellicose vocals, with only the leads and the sonorous backing vocals hinting at the band’s folk influences, as is the case on almost all of the metal-orientated songs on this record. The slower and ponderous Som Genom Ett Trollslag is melodic black metal done extremely well, with slick, angular guitar work and muscular rhythms coupled with an at times measured pace and caustic vocals. It makes for another incredibly imaginative and memorable slab of blackened folk, and serves as perhaps the song that best blends the two extremes within the band’s sound together, rather than keeping the two halves mostly separate.
Although this is only a brief EP, it’s anything but a throwaway release, with much of the music on here being as impressive as the band’s work on their most recent album, 2022’s Gastkramad, with the four main songs, as well as the two briefer pieces, being incredibly powerful and punchy. The one thing that does let this record down ever so slightly is the fact that although BERGSVRIDEN‘s sound draws heavily from both black metal and folk music, the two elements are rarely intermingled, and if a listener heard one of the heavier songs on here, only the dancing, folky lead melodies would act as a hint that this band had an underlying folk influence. If these two components were blended together more seamlessly, this could have had a brilliantly layered and expansive sound, but luckily the music as it is is already strong enough on its own merit to mean that even this more effective mixing of styles would only make these already fantastic songs slightly better.
Rating: 8/10
Uråldrad is out now via self-release.
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