Rating: 7.5

Country: Sweden

Release Date: 2006

Record Label: Profound Lore

Track list:
1. ... Of Flesh & Blood
2. Unanimation
3. Split-Tounged
4. The Omega Rising
5. Coffinborn
6. Silent Hosts Of Decay
7. Engulfed In Hellfire
8. Lifeless, Cold & Crimson
9. Out Of The Evening Mist
10. Pet Cemetary (Japanese bonus track)
11. World Wide War (Japanese bonus track)

Total playing time: 48:38

Contact: Profundi

Profundi - The Omega Rising

Jens Rydén - everything

Schadenfreude in musica. You've witnessed it before, from Hawkwind and Motorhead to Metallica and Megadeth; an exiled or retired band member starting an act that, regardless of his conscious standing with his previous band, devours them and shits them into the sun. Profundi is ex-Naglfar's Jens Rydén's latest project, and it does just that.

I hate to resort to something as obvious and pedestrian as a comparison so early in the review, but there's no avoiding it. Much like Naglfar, Profundi plays a sort of melodic black metal (that some bafflingly know as "blackened death metal," a hideous misnomer -- but who the fuck cares about names?) that worships the likes of Dissection and Sacramentum. But unlike those archetypical Swedish acts, Profundi disregards the expectations of a frigid guitar tone, wintry bombast and neofolk acoustic fiddling in favor of whimsical chord progressions endowed with a larger-than-life aesthetic thanks to its modern wall-of-sound production. The shudderingly dense mix and prominent low-end might at first strike you as ill-applied to a musical niche noted for its complex narratives of tremolo picked leads, but it's actually stunningly appropriate due to how many subtle death metal and thrash motifs the album borrows. While they add a unique flavor to the riffs and juxtapose well with the beefy production, The Omega Rising for the most part emphasizes majestic leads and a hyperspeed galloping stride that can be traced back to anywhere from early Setherial material to NWOBHM bands.

Assisting in the cacophonous vortex of noise characterizing the otherwise unrevolutionary black metal of The Omega Rising is Jens' voice, snarling rabidly from all sides like a symphony of wounded wolves. Not only does he sound significantly more crazed than his Naglfar days, with rapid pronounciation and spiteful emphasis on the more bitter lines he spits, but his range has improved; his screams at times descending into guttural growls (keep in mind that the death grunts on Vittra were handled by Hypocrisy's Peter Tägtgren), and -- in the case of the song "Coffinborn" -- transforming into a one-man choir. The downside of this new violent emphasis on vocals is that they're layered like an onion to achieve their desired effect on the listener, and vocal layering to such an extent always strikes me as a bit artificial. But the entire album is pretty overproduced, and while that could prove to be troublesome to the paradoxical breed of humans known as black metal purists (you know who you are), production carries little weight next to the artistic integrity on display.

One thing that's always irked me about "modern" black metal is that, perhaps more than any other genre, the more it embraces artificial bombast and studio bullshit, the more it compromises the music's inherent human element. There's some use of keyboards here, but unlike the likes of Dimmu Borgir (the dreaded "D word" of black metal reviews), it's never overstated, and unlike Naglfar, it's natural and always adherent to the central structures of the songs. The effectiveness of the organ passages still amazes me; this is the only metal album aside from some of Sigh's early work I've heard in which the organ pieces didn't evoke images of a scrawny goth baring false fangs bought at Hot Topic in front of his Tim Burton DVD collection. They're quite haunting, actually. "Out of The Evening Mist" opens with a thunderous orchestral passage, but any accusation of pomposity you begin to summon is shot out of the sky as the guitar kicks in and restates the dirgey prelude with pinch harmonics, bridging to the actual song with stylish grace and a sinister sneer. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the clicky programmed drums, which are obscenely high in the mix for what's probably the album's most intrusive flaw.

For those who care, the packaging is a piece of art in itself. As you open the North American version, the six-panel digipack feature an illustration of an angel being murdered by a trident-wielding demon. And if by this point you still somehow think Jens' stance on angels is ambiguous, the booklet acts as a flipbook depicting an angel being decapitated. Nice.

Perhaps the most commendable aspect of this album is its consistency; it's utterly trimmed of fat. Even the short interlude "Silent Hosts of Decay" is a lesson in how disposable ambient pieces should be handled. Choosing the best song of this album is like picking the guy most likely to appear on the next episode of To Catch a Predator out of a congo line of Catholic priests at a birthday party. Not only is The Omega Rising the direction Naglfar should have taken after Vittra, but it's a ballsy piece of metal in its own right. The fact that a single person can produce such a solid album should leave any sane black metal enthusiast throughly attentive to Jens Rydén's future engagements.

November 2nd, 2007