vote
6.0
- Band:
Bergsvriden - Duration: 00:34:09
- Available from: 12/09/2025
- Label:
-
Dusktone
The Bergsvriden are a Swedish trio-whose members also play with the Midvinterblot, a group dedicated to Folk/Black Metal-which now reaches the finish line of the fourth full-length album. Since the beginning, the band has never hidden that it initially took inspiration from bands such as Finntroll, Trollfest and the like for their more or less folk and fun approach to which to add a little aggression, thanks to a riffing more tending to black metal. In the past, this idea has given Bergsvriden some fair results, although the Folk Metal side has never been too developed and enriched, while the Black Metal parts have almost always been free of typical violence congenital to this genre. And so the band has bargained with swinging skill in a musical limbo where there are folk parts that mostly have the task of introducing and setting stories where trolls and other creatures of the Nordic popular tradition live, while the Black Metal sections is entrusted with the task of translating everything into a darker context.
The choice made by the formation is difficult to be performed already in theory and also the mass is not easy for the result to be confirmed interesting. Still, the Bergsvriden in the debut “I Vitterhetens Becksvarta Gömmen” had managed to find a precarious balance and to make ends meet, despite the fact that the final result was not striking. The new album, on the other hand, leaves a lot displaced because the band decidedly turns its style towards a rather minimal black metal with a sometimes horrifying mood, almost forgetting the folk roots of its sound. Unfortunately, a job little more than mediocre comes out, as the proposed black metal soon proves to be a little substance, skinny and without personality.
In reality, the album begins on the right foot, in spite of a negligible introduction: in fact, it opens the “Helvetesrittenten” dances, the best song of the entire lot and also the only black metal episode of a certain importance. The 'folk' touch on this piece is on balance represented only by a short detachment of acoustic guitar, definitely too little. In the subsequent and pleasant “En Rysig Haggas Spel”, an arpeggio instead is put at the beginning of the song, for a plot that then leaves room for a Riffing Black Metal with rather cheerful melodies, supported by 'danceable' rhythms that can bring everything back within the tracks of that 'folk/black metal' to which the band has tried to get used to it.
Something similar also happens in title-track, even if here the atmospheres seem more suitable to describe a disturbing story, while the work of guitars follows the melodies suitable for a party for trolls and fairy. From here on, the band's sound substantially repeats itself, becoming even more flat, with pieces that follow one another without leaving a mark and without giving a well defined direction to the disc. The final result is therefore an interlocutory and all in all negligible work, which risks leaving a bitterness in the mouth both to lovers of the more adult folk metal, and (above all) to the worshipers of the black flame.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
