Band Names Not Brand Names

Black metal, Norway, Satan. For so many years, these have been synonymous with each other. When I think Norway, I don’t think beautiful fjords or beautiful women, I think of contry full of Satanists and people dedicating their lives to rebellion and trying to bring Helvete to Earth. And frankly, why not? With an entire country’s glorious heritage tucked under the rug by Christians, it only seems natural to follow the anti-thesis or go back to pre-Christian rites. Hordagaard want to do just that. With their 2006 release My Glory for Satan on Occultum Productions, Fauk took his best songs from 1999 to 2006 and put them all down on a single black, hate-filled disc.

Fourteen tracks of pure hate and pure old school black metal straight from Norway’s underground. From track one, Krig Hat Og Blod, to track fourteen, Hail Hell, it’s fuzzy down-tuned guitars and screeching lyrics for 65 minutes. You can hear a natural progression in production and lyrics throughout all of the tracks as the album progresses. Krig Hat Og Blod starts out exactly like you expect: harsh, bleeding drums, distorted guitars and Fauk screaming. But then you hit an amazing track such as Begraveles Liden (track 2) and you can hear musical maturity, you can hear how much more work Fauk puts into each song. Track 2 starts off fast and blazing with double time guitars and high tempo cymbals into a crescendo of hate in a song that sounds familiarly like blackened folk metal in the choruses and bridge. It’s fast, it’s dirty, it’s slow and folky, it has melody and has an excellent segue at 1:29 into the track. Fauk slows the tempo to a doom crawl and slowly licks the guitar for a drone atmosphere and pulls the lyrics from the typical black metal screaming to something more fitting for the doomy lull he’s got going on.

As you progress through the CD, you too progress through Fauk’s journey as a musician. What starts out so blasting as old school black metal transforms into more progressive and folk-influenced black metal. Track 8, Skamkvesta Sjede, introduces us to a fantastical intro with ceremonial drums, a flute, and what sounds like a woman being tortured to death. And let me tell you, it sounds lovely. Soon after the intro finishes, Hordagaard explode into full march black metal with a very measured lyric tone and step. It’s very much a song of hatred and pain told only through swaying drum tempos and the staccato vocals. This is an amazing track for Fauk to produce because it shows he can step outside his norm of by-the-book Norweigan black metal and play something with a varying degree of technicality and melody. Overall, all fourteens tracks are great and will sound familiar to any black metal listener.

Now, some disheartening points about the release. SInce this is a compilation of songs and varying production, the song quality definitely shows this. Some tracks are clear and crisp such as track 8, track 5, or track 2 but then some show poor production quality such as track 9 Hunger Og Morke with overbearing drums and drowned out vocals. I’ve become accustomed to garage sound but sometimes, songs sound worse than that, they sound flat and tinny. A few tracks on the release actually have audible skips and gaps in audio and this was in the mastering of the CD, not the production. I spoke to Voxum about this when I first got the CD back in October 2006 and he said he already knew about this as did Fauk and it was like that on the masters. So if you hear skipping or audio gaps, it’s not your CD or your ears, it’s just how the master was cut. There was talk of a re-release to fix these errors but I’m not if that will ever come to fruition.

Overall, I loved the CD and have listened to it a number of times since I first received it. I can’t believe it took five months to write all of this but it did, mainly due to things I have to do instead of write and I hate it took so long. The CD is good overall and shows a great progression of musicianship and production skills. I believe Voxum still has a few copies left for purchase from Occultum so pick one up if you can!