On Ginnungagap, Seidr's follow up to their 2011 debut album For Winter Fire, the Louisville, Kentucky band meld the folky doom of earlier material with post-rock and black metal. The result is a massive and awe-inspiring album, maybe one of the best metal releases of 2013.
Ginnungagap opens with "A Blink of the Cosmic Eye," a 17-minute long behemoth of a song that subjects the listener to a 10-minute intro of droning guitars, throat singing, and a sitar before a Carl Sagan sound bite comes in to herald the beginning of the album proper. Once the second track, "The Pillars of Creation", begins it's immediately clear that Ginnungagap isn't going to be your typical doom metal album. A substantial portion of the track's ten minute run time could easily pass for something off of a Mogwai or Explosions In the Sky album. The same goes for "The Red Planet Rises."
Before you Trve Kvlt weiners dismiss Seidr as hipster posers based on that last sentence, keep in mind: between the relatively infrequent post-rock sections, there is a full hour's worth of vicious death and folk tinged doom metal. "Ginnungagap" pounds listeners with far beyond heavy riffing while Austin Lunn (the guy behind Panopticon) growls and bellows like a wild man. Likewise, the album's closing track, "Sweltering II: A Pale Blue Dot in the Vast Dark," is a 25-minute long beast that combines all of Ginnungagap's disparate musical qualities into one brutal and emotionally exhausting song.
There are an increasing number of metal bands that create music that could be described as expansive, but Seidr sound downright cosmic. Ginningagap is the sound of a band standing on the edge of oblivion and defiantly screaming in to the void; it's a fitting soundtrack for a pale blue dot spinning alone in endless space.
Ginnungagap was originally scheduled for release on September 17th through Bindrune Recordings, but the album's been delayed for unknown reasons. There's no release date yet, but you can stream the entire album via The Gauntlet right now.
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