Livin' La Vida Loka
Review by Metallattorney. He is the law.
Well with the opening track on this one I was once again a little nervous that I was going to strongly dislike another album from Napalm Records. The first track is extremely cheesy and sounds like the kind of overly-wrought opening anthem that Manowar would put out. But just when I was getting prepared for some ridiculous Manowar-covering-Bathory ludicrousness, the opening of the second track started. "Sleipnir" kicks things into high gear with a galloping riff and leads into the harsh vocal style. Everything is still kind of upbeat and sunny but at least it is not as over-the-top as the opening intro lead me to believe it would be. Of course then it went all happy and flowery again on the next track. Many of the rest of the songs continue with this more
Of all the Nordic countries, Iceland is the only one without a significant stable of well-known metal bands. Chalk that up to population--a bit over 300,000, where Finland, Norway, and Denmark are around 5 million, and Sweden has over 9 million. But considering the ratio of great bands to people in these countries hovers somewhere around 1:30, there should still be about 10,000 Icelandic bands worth checking out. Trust me on those figures--science doesn't lie.
. I'm unfamiliar with their back catalog, which is said to have begun in Viking metal territory. There's none of that on Svartir Sandar, but there is plenty of interesting stuff going on.