Rating: 8.3

Country: Germany

Release Date: 2006

Record Label: Van

Track list:
1. Schwertes Schaerfe Beichtgesang
2. Veitersberg 1487
3. Heimatferne Rast
4. Ahnenwerk


Band Website: Kermania

Kermania - Ahnenwerk

Weigand - Guitars, Bass, Accoustics, Vocals
Alexander von Meilenwald - Session Drums

Even if the cover artwork didn't already make it abundantly clear, then the melancholy opening accoustic guitar and deep, narrating German voice pretty much immediately shows what Kermania's debut album is about within seconds of starting the album. Multi-instrumentalist Weigand and his comrade von Meilenwald (of Nagelfar and Ruins of Beverast fame) play a particularly nostalgia-inducing and melancholic type of pagan black metal that sounds heavily inspired by the Nagelfar debut, early Ulver, the Finnish Wyrd and Burzum's most trancelike works. What sets Kermania apart from most of these acts is that typical German black metal sound that is best described as ‘robust'. The fact that this can be said for an album which otherwise takes after the more ghostly, thin sounding pagan metal bands is especially noteworthy. Most of the time during the first song for example, the guitars and drums proceed in a stately mid-tempo, playing the types of riffs that bring to mind the heathen past now lost in the mists of time, awash in a foggy guitar-fuzz perfectly capturing that sense of distance, ephemerality and the tragically lost past; and yet there's still somehow this typically German prideful, heavy robustness or immediateness at work here, which contrives to make this sound like more than just a ghostly image of the past. This quality is present throughout the entire album and really helps to project whatever atmosphere is being channeled through the music.

It's a good thing that the atmosphere comes across so well, because they sure do take their sweet time making it. Two of the tracks on here are well over twenty minutes. Even though they milk some of those melancholic, slower riffs for all that they are worth, there's still a surprising amount of variety on offer here. There are times when the music speeds up to a warlike charge straight out of a Nagelfar record, where that earlier mentioned robustness discards its foggy, ephemeral mantle and just comes at you with the force of a berserker-horde in the full throes of battle rage, before settling back into a reverbed, Burzumic drone. There are occasional moments of pure acoustic guitar playing, sometimes accompanied by military march style drumming and clean chanting that usually serve as interludes in the epic narratives of the two larger tracks. Weigands vocals alternate between raven like screeches, slightly amateurish but highly affecting clean chants and even the odd wolfish howl! A. von Meilenwald's drumming is, as we've come to expect of him, extremely effective and engaging, knowing exactly what to add to any riff-arrangement to give it that extra oomph. As mentioned the production somehow creates this ancient, foggy sound to everything while simultaneously letting an underlying force or heaviness shine forth, while the mix is very well balanced especially in the way that it allows two guitar layers to counter and build off of each other, later on in the album overlaying the occasional acoustic guitar on top of them for that added feeling of space and timelessness. This is done to especially great effect in the closing track, which sounds equally like a triumphant victory as well as a final farewell, with some fantastic interplay between spacious accoustics and epic lead-guitar.

Although one could level the complaint that some riffs are continued way too long, such criticism would miss the point of the album. Ahnenwerk is all about getting absorbed in the flow of epic musical storytelling, in the same manner as one can get absorbed in such epic tales as presented in the Edda and similar poetic sagas. Kermania succeeds with gusto in setting an atmosphere evoking the heathen days of old and the long meandering, dreamy riffs add as much to this sensation as the more immediately forceful powerchording that is sometimes unleashed to devastating effect here. The two larger songs and their smaller interlude and epilogue companions (which are still each in excess of six minutes) act like chapters to one overarching epos detaling the travails, conquests and tragedies of a people. And more than that, the typical forcefulness of the sound makes you feel like a participant in the tale and not just some outside observer. And with atmospheric music like this, that is the most praiseworthy thing that can possibly be said about it. So if you like to fancy yourself the participant in an ancient volkssaga for a while, than Kermania is most definitely recommended to satisfy that particular urge.

December 6th, 2006