Category: Audio Published on Thursday, 26 February 2009 00:00 Written by Graham Mills Hits: 138
10 Summoning take the Black Metal music style of fast strumming guitar playing and shriek vocals mixed with heavy amounts of synths and melodic rythms in order to produce a kind of sub-genre in Black Metal. This music is obviously far from the musical and ideological concepts of Black Metal, but this change in the style should be welcome since it offers a new aspect of Black Metal not very used before in this extension: the epic, the wandering effect or the sense of being in another land by creating atmosphere. In Stronghold Summonig take those concepts to their music. The production is perfect, all the instruments sound clear and with enough volume. The guitar rythms are a little bit slower than in previous albums, formed this time by power chords instead of fast strumming. The drumms (by a drumm machine) are slow to middle paced, with few variations in each song. The vocals in this album do not have the variety shown in previous albums, although some female vocals are included. Almost all the songs are wrapped by the synths, which in many cases lead the main melody. This may be pretty annoying for some listeners who expect raw, fast and evil Black Metal, rather than listening to something that sounds, as some reviewers have said, like a movie soundtrack, but the price for giving a chance to this album is high. Stronghold would be better understood in terms of atmospheric and abstract concepts rather than musical descriptions. Stronghold gives you a sense of traveling through unknown lands, contempling overwhelming landscapes of mountains and forests. Yeah, I know, that sounds pretty cheesy, but let's not get carried away by this prejudice, since some Black Metal bands achieved in several songs the capacity of taking the listener to another plains of conscious (the song "det som engang var" from Burzum is one example). Of course the feeling is different, but the capacity of both Summoning and Burzum is there. This is not an album to bang your head and thrash all around, but to start a long trip or simply create a barrier between you and the external noisy world. Stronghold is a good choice for those fans who have never listened to Summoning and want to give it a try. The excellent production, easy listening and variety in tracks will atract to many fans who prefer melodic Black Metal different from Dimmu Borgir and similar bands. It's hard to choose the best tracks in this album, since all of them are very well done, but "the rotting horse on the deadly ground" and "the loud music of the sky" are my favorite.