Ragnarok, Norwegian Black Metal band released through Agonia Records their seventh full length called Malediction.
If you are a fan of traditional Black Metal you will enjoy this album a lot.
If you expect atmosphere, feeling, darkness, you won't.
Starting with the artwork cover, it shows us a throne with a "skulled" character similar to a saint sitting on it. Meaning, even though there is all the ancient look and the halo, this character has no face or head, but a skull instead. Hanging on their neck there is a reversed cross as in a Rosary, but just upside down.
On the lap of this character lies a faint woman bearing a few cuts on her right arm and at their feet lays a naked angel, as innocent as a baby, just dead.
Regarding the album, it has ten tracks, not very original. It is the typical "blast beat Black Metal", where the drums sometimes sounds like a machine never stopping for even one second. It's true that Ragnarok plays this traditional Black Metal awesomely good, they really know how to play it, but in terms of content, there's not much to say about it. There are few melodious riffs, pretty chords, but again, not much more than that. The song Dystocratic is perhaps the surprising one, showing some musicality, which is not very patent in the rest of the album unfortunately.
It is a bit hard to understand the point the band tried to make with this album, since they are so experienced but for some reason not able to show us something better or at least a bit different. It's not that a band should change their style or anything like that, but a bit of improvement is always good, and even though they are all very good musicians, the result is more of the same.
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