Burzum – Umskiptar

May 21, 2012 • Byelobog Productions

Can you believe it? Here I am, already reviewing another Burzum album; it seems like Fallen came out just yesterday. Varg's been busy (not even counting an album of re-recorded old songs which I have no interest in). Surprisingly, Umskiptar is a significant improvement over Fallen, but the time has not yet come for me to eat my words over whether Burzum has a future—the album doesn't hold itself up long enough for me to truly consider it "good", though it has its moments.

In fact, I was pretty pumped after the first half of the album. It's the same sort of midpaced, non-extreme atmospheric black metal we've come to expect, although there is finally a bit more variation in the riffing and drumming, giving it a much more folky / Viking metal edge. I feel like the songwriting is a bit better than the last couple albums (at least at first); "Alfadanz" especially has some neat riffs and is probably my favorite track because of them. The vocals are also improved—the clean singing has been mostly ditched or pushed to the background in favor of spoken word and harsh yet almost whisper-like vocals, which are actually kind of neat. He never busts out the demented screams of his older material, but that's expected. I'm not enthralled, though; it's better but it's still not original or exciting.

That's the first five or six songs, anyway. After that the wheels come off and Umskiptar crashes unceremoniously and rather pathetically. The writing has already gotten a little stale around "Valgaldr", but the last four tracks are completely pointless. All of "Galgviðr", "Surtr Sunnan", and "Gullaldr" are a combination of bad singing and uninteresting guitar lines—no rhythm section. Now, obviously, it's perfectly possible to write a good song of just guitar and vocals, but Burzum is not the place to do it, and these three tracks are a bit embarrassing. The closer is a longer and therefore more useless version of the opener, barely worth mentioning.

Had those last four tracks been cut, Umskiptar could have been pretty respectable, but they ruin the experience a lot for me. Overall, it's still definitely not up to par with other modern black and folk metal, although I can cut him some slack for being older than most bands; yet I wouldn't recommend this as, again, it feels too stale to be enthusiastic about it. I was never a huge fan of Burzum to begin with, so those kinds of people would probably enjoy this quite a bit, but otherwise pass it up.

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