SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: AMON AMARTH – THE GREAT HEATHEN ARMY

Amon Amarth
The Great Heathen Army
Metal Blade Records

With a Viking pop cultural moment in Netflix’s Vikings: Valhalla series, it is an auspicious time for melodic death metal band Amon Amarth to release its 12th album. Plundering Norse mythology and history for lyrical themes, Amon Amarth’s Viking shtick has been both a barrier to entry for would-be fans and a branding cornerstone of its success. Teeming with catchy, heavy riffing and theatrical battlefield violence, The Great Heathen Army is the Swedish band’s most accessible album yet.

The title track is downright danceable. Evincing the dread of the historical Great Heathen Army’s raids on ninth century English monasteries, vocalist Johan Hegg bellows, “You know there’s nowhere you can run/ Salvation will never coooome!” Hegg’s ability to enunciate powerful, deeply growled roars in key is astonishing, and his vivid storytelling elevates formulaic song structures.

Andy Sneap’s super-slick production is crisp but unfortunately extracts Amon Amarth’s menace, like “a dog without a bite…a wasp without a sting,” to quote opener “Get in the Ring.” “Heidrun” is the only death metal song honoring a mythical goat you’ll hear. Complete with bleats, this folk metal (goat) cheese curdles because they take themselves too seriously to break character. “Heidrun” sounds like a humorless version of English lad-rockers Kasabian, Amon Amarth fixated on mead and mutton instead of Ecstasy and hooliganism.

“Oden Owns You All” utterly does. It double-bass drum kicks dual speed metal guitar riffs into a deep groove chorus punctuated by Jocke Wallgren’s technical drumming–just one of his superior performances throughout The Great Heathen Army. “Dawn Of Norsemen” is another thrash number with a captivating middle eight. The two guitarists pick against a stark silence, a welcome respite before a harrowing modal bridge to doom. Applied to other tracks, the range the band displays here would have made this very good album great.

Regardless, Amon Amarth can still make a great song like “The Serpent’s Trail,” which swings from loss to hopelessness to salvation like an epic poem. Melodic guitar figures and symphonic elements intertwine and build to Hegg’s gripping, spoken word-then screamed revelation: “As I face my deepest fears, I open up my heart/ And so a different path appears, my ascension starts.”

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