Kjeld
Skym

Bwaaaaaargh Aaaaaarrrrrghh Puuuuummfffff Grrrruuuuuuuummmmp! Damn damn damn! Fuck you bastards! Go stick something up your ass! Boooooouuuuhhh! Sock-puppet!

Yeah, that’s the kind of lyrics we get from ’Skym’, except for them not singing in English but ”Frisian” – some sort of obscure sub-dialect to German-Dutch. Haven’t you ran off for the album yet? Well, let me tempt you with Hammerhearts’ selling points that they are best described as ”deeply rooted in the Scandinavian Black Metal tradition” … in other words – primitive Norwegian shit. But then they go on describing how ”cold melodic passages and brutal assaults nicely merge into their own magickal [sic] blend” and that kind of makes all the difference, doesn’t it? No? Well, maybe the fact that we get 58 minutes of these brutal assaults divided on eleven tracks with this Scandinavian black metal inspired mess that sounds almost identical all the way from start to finish will make you want to warm up for a runt o the record store? No? Me neither, to be honest. It sounds like shit when you describe it and it sounds even worse when you hear it.

I guess the melodic passages they talk about are the arrangements found in the background of the rattling drums, that shouting psychopath and the monotonous guitars. I will give them credit for having these, though, as they actually makes these songs much more better than it had been without them as it had been done if they’d followed the Norwegian recipe to every point. However, it doesn’t really matter what you’re doing in the background if the foreground sounds like a piece of lard. It’s like painting your walls lighter to fresh up your WC when you have an unflushed toilet that’s kept getting filled up for the past year. Kind of the wrong end of things.

The vocal performance was described as a psychopath shouting above and the things he shouts are pretty much the things written in the first paragraph. Track after track follows more or less the same vocal pattern – same tone, same kind of words articulated in what sounds like the same order. But it’s really not singing or words we’re talking about, neither is it growl or grunts or whatever sort of vocals we can define as melodically spoken words but pure insane shouting in random order completely unrelated to how the music sound. The music doesn’t really change tone but when it marginally takes a slightly different approach the vocals keep on going the same way. And when the music sounds like it more or less does all the time… well so does the vocals. No changes there, except for the fact that sometimes the mental patient is quiet. There are actually parts of the music that are instrumental and without the shouts. The thing is, though, that it’s not solo-pieces we’re talking where the musicians show their instrumental skills but just parts where it sounds like they forgot to put on the microphone and then just kept going until it was turned on and the shouting freak returned.

At least it’s fast, though. Drums clatter like a playing card mounted to a bikes spokes while it rolls down Matterhorn. A couple of tracks are a bit calmer though, but not still really different from the rest, you know the ones that all sounds alike. I think Kjeld would have appreciated me calling them aggressive but honestly it’s not particularly heavy or hard. It’s just fast and irritating, music to get annoyed by put simple.

When everything comes around this is album should only have one audience and it’s the same people that has found gold in everything we on Hallowed call shit. If you are one of those who think I’m full of shit and all my reviews are upside down and that I just don’t get the genius of bands that sounds like fox pee, then by all means take your time to glutton in ’Skym’. All of you who read Hallowed and think we normally are on the right track with our reviews… hear my warning – stay away from this album!

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