Year Of Metal #098: Bathory - Blood On Ice
The word “visionary” is bandied about in the arts quite a bit, but Quorthon, the late frontman and sometime sole member of Swedish viking metallers Bathory, truly fits the bill. Here’s a guy who tore through over a dozen albums before his death aged 38, sometimes playing all the instruments, solely responsible for crafting the mythology behind these songs of high fantasy, tales of love and death and fate and war.
All of that tends to be anathema to me, but Blood On Ice has a trick up its sleeve: it’s recorded really quite badly, meaning instead of sounding like a slick, high budget affair, it has the vibe of three dudes in a basement getting lost in a wild world of their own. Apparently it was initially put on tape in the late ‘80s, then remastered for its 1996 release, which contributes to the strange inconsistencies in the sound (the drums, most notably, are sometimes St Anger levels of bad, other times fine). The fidelity also means you can’t often make out the story behind the record, which from the Wiki recap is a boon to me. That combined with some brilliantly written songs and performances makes this a surprising winner in my book.
They start things off with nearly two minutes of scene-setting foley - creepy rumblings, lambs (presumably ready for the slaughter) bleating, the thunder of horse hooves. It serves well to set you up for a seriously intense album, but when the album boots into life, it isn’t really something to be feared. That’s not to say the opening title track isn’t good, because it is - the vocals in particular are so winning on this record. Loads of the songs are bolstered by baritone “oh-oh-oh”s which, to me, put the viking in viking metal. As an overture, this no doubt sets up the LP’s story, but I can’t really make out a lot of what my man’s saying - again, though, I’m fine with this. It all builds to a colossal, dramatic drawn out scream, our call to adventure.
Blood On Ice really hits its straps during a run of smashes in the middle. It starts with “The Sword”, a lumbering number with gigantic guitars that come in waves. I don’t know if it was intentional but I love the murky texture here. It sounds like Bathory have got carried away with the overdubs, and the result is kind of muddy, but the piled up, fuzzy chords sound so cool. Then there’s standout track “The Stallion”. This one’s a little better recorded and more complex in its composition, and the mounting drama is so enjoyable. There’s also a great solo, something surprisingly bluesy and “normal” in an album so dead set on fantastical world building.
That’s followed by “The Woodsman”, by which point Bathory are in goth rock mode. It’s at this point that I realised why I was digging the “oh-oh-oh”s so much - they’re reminiscent of Sisters Of Mercy. Sure, they’re singing about ravens and the clash of steel etc instead of whatever nonsense the Sisters were singing about, but there’s a through-line. By the time we get to the stirring chorus, I think you can work your way through to My Chemical Romance. It’s a great tradition of enjoyably pompous, difficult to categorise, wintery sounding music.
The album’s on a bit of a knife edge for me because the production could so easily go one way or the other (either into sounds that are just too crap, or making the fantasy elements untenably polished), but Blood On Ice hits a sweet spot.
