Narvik
Ascension to Apotheosis

This German trio has taken their name from a town in Noway, a town from where a musician that inspired them hailed – hence the choice of that name. One of the members has named himself from a disease and another one from a letter in the alphabet. Black metal, probably inspired by Norwegian black metal is a thing that springs to mind when reading cryptic names and all of that stuff around this album. The cover art is quite funny, the title of their second album is Ascension to Apotheosis and I have been looking at it.

Musically it is quite ordinary black metal on most measurable accounts, though the production is lightly better and they may be a bit more technical and systematic in comparison with most. The music is however mostly ordinary black metal with the things that are usually there, smattering drums, the riff we always hear and the grunty vocals. This album offers no real surprises, predictable is a word I would use for it. The first track is instrumental but following that are seven very predictable tracks and the playing time for the album is just over 40 minutes without much in terms of variation. I am not a connoisseur of black metal so I don’t really know if it is a quality production for the genre or not, I know that I have heard better and also many worse productions than this one in the black metal genre.

I don’t really fancy this album, it isn’t a particularly interesting album. It feels pretty tame, pretty tired and pretty boring. I don’t think these Germans offer anything we haven’t heard before but of course if you are a black metaller you will probably disagree with what I write, you might want to check it out. I cannot really find anything on this album that grabs my attention it just passes by and then it is forgotten as fast as it plays through. I don’t really think Narvik the band does anything to even come close to being as interesting as Narvik the place.

This is just a tired and fairly typical black metal album that doesn’t quite take off and go anywhere. We have heard it all before and it has been done a lot better many times before, I think black metallers could like it but there is not much that catches the attention of this metal critic. I’d rather go to Narvik than listening to the music of Narvik, that could be a clever enough ending phrase for this review.

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