RIITIIR
| RIITIIR | ||||
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| Enslaved's studio album | ||||
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Publication |
September 28, 2012 (Europe), October 2, 2012 (USA) |
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| Label (s) | Indie Recordings / Nuclear Blast | |||
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Format (s) |
CD |
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Title (number) |
8th |
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running time |
67 min 19 s |
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| occupation |
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Enslaved |
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RIITIIR is the twelfth album of Enslaved . It was released on Indie Recordings / Nuclear Blast in 2012 .
Emergence
The band worked for more than half a year on RIITIIR , the birth of the daughter of guitarist Ivar Bjørnson “fell in the middle of the songwriting phase. That really bothered me. ”Otherwise the work went without complications. Bjørnson wrote the songs and made demo recordings in his own Personal Sound Studio before sending the material to singers Grutle Kjellson and Herbrand Larsen , who were "completely free" with their vocal passages. Roots of the Mountain was composed on Bjørnson's mobile phone. The album was recorded in Bjørnson's apartment in Bergen, the drums in Duper Studio and Larsen's and Arve Isdal's contributions in Earshot Studios. The album was mixed by Jens Bogren in Örebro. According to Bjørnson, "Everything was finished when the cover painting finally dried in mid-July."
Music style and lyrics
The compositions "live [...] more than ever before from the contrast between the rough turmoil of Grutle Kjellson and Herbrand Larsen's bright vocals, between (residual) aggression and catchy catchiness; everything is arranged in a complex way ", whereby according to Christoph Meul from metal.de " the two contrary moods, the aggressive and the relaxed, are now so tiny that their permanent alternation hardly leaves them room to develop. Larsen's soft organ, on the other hand, is given a bit of space, which, together with the tidy sound, leads to a few moments dangerously close to the tips of kitsch, at which many bands in advanced career stages have already been smashed. "The clear vocals" are more prominent than on the new work ever before". The album does not bring with it as much renewal as its predecessor Axioma Ethica Odini , “but instead is the much-touted“ natural development ”in nuances. Which in the case of the Norwegians means that they took AXIOMA ETHICA ODINI as a starting point and added or reinforced a number of elements. "According to Ivar Bjørnson, the album is" more varied and bigger in every respect [...]. The melodies are more interesting, the gentle passages more beautiful, the aggressive sections rougher and so on. ”The two previous albums are perhaps more specialized: Vertebrae “ was more direct, focused on the Metal aspects of ENSLAVED ”, Axioma Ethica Odini “ more like them gentle, introverted side of our music ”. For him, RIITIIR represents “a synthesis of these two directions - and at the same time it refers to the roots of the band with its freer structures, longer songs and harder outbursts”.
According to Bjørnson, Thoughts Like Hammers is “very unstructured and confusing” and according to Robert Müller from Metal Hammer “[e] in a subtle part, full of dynamics, then very melodic towards the end”. Death in the Eyes of Dawn was loudly According Bjørnson greatly from Bathory Twilight-of-the-Gods inspired phase, while the thrash metal - riffs at Veilburner Müller at Voivod remember. According to Bjørnson, Roots of the Mountain contains “the harshest as well as the softest moments”. The theme song RIITIIR is referred to by Bjørnson as Voivod- "Rip-off". The material, which is atypical for Enslaved , is “influenced by Alice In Chains , old Iron Maiden and again Bathory”. Storm of Memories is psychedelic and krautrock- influenced. <Mh92012 /> Forsaken contains an electronica passage that “puts an end to a wild beating and leads to what is almost the longest, calmest and most hauntingly intense song part that Enslaved have ever written ".
It is in RIITIIR a concept album . It deals with human rites and common features of ancient cultures. The name is an invented word invented by the band, derived from the English terms rites ' rites ' and rituals ' rituals ' and based on Nordic languages and stands for “the rites of mankind” in a formulaic and simple way. According to Bjørnson, the band wanted “a word that reflects the ritualistic character of our music in a distorted way [...] It does not come from any language, but it is symmetrical and opens the mind by inviting many thoughts instead of excluding all of them in favor of a clear statement - and yet it gives the direction. ”The lyrics are“ loosely connected by means of a concept that deals with the instincts that people had in pre- monotheistic times ”. On this album, the band considers “similarities that can be found in very different cultures and mythologies around the world. People from completely different corners of the world, without contact with each other, seem to have shared almost exactly the same gods, who symbolize certain powers - only under different names. So one can say that we shared an ancient, metaphysical spiritual world, the same irrational fears and the same inclination towards something greater, more divine than humanity itself. "According to Robert Müller," [the] words in Enslaved [...] were often enough a, let us put it politely, a hermetic structure that is difficult to see through, based on Nordic mythological motifs, which refuse any deeper meaning when you read it carefully ”; Bjørnson replied, according to Müller "a little piqued": "In the world of our music they make sense", but he knows what Müller mean. Words are “just difficult to describe the look in the mirror that we do with our music. In case it calms down, there isn't a big esoteric concept on this album. 'Thoughts Like Hammers', the first song, is the closest to what could be called a common thread. The title sounds like Nietzsche , ' philosophizing with a hammer ' and all that, but it's more primitive: It's about Thor and what he embodies - destruction in order to be able to build new things, the breaking of patterns in order to rethink can. To a certain extent, 'material' forms the opposite pole; the Freya to Thor, the feminine to the masculine side, which says to let what will flourish. "
reception
Meul awarded 7 out of 10 points. He missed “the great, all-rounding arc of tension - simply because not even two or three songs (as captivating as some may be taken in isolation) are fish or meat, none of them just thunder at twelve or are kept completely calm ". He was "[b] a bit disappointed in the first run [...], but gradually I realized that it is better than the first impression would lead you to believe - with its contrasts between hard and gentle passages and some strong atmospheric refrains" . Kjellson himself said that when he first listened to it, he “thought that the album could do little”, but that the band was “now very proud of the result”. In the Metal Hammer the album was like the previous album of the month. Petra Schurer awarded 6 out of 7 points and wrote that the record left the listener "not as breathlessly amazed as AXIOMA ETHICA ODINI, but instead is the much-invoked 'natural development' in nuances".
Track list
- Thoughts Like Hammers - 9:30 am
- Death in the Eyes of Dawn - 8:17
- Veilburner - 6:46
- Roots of the Mountain - 9:16 am
- RIITIIR - 5:26
- Materal - 7:48
- Storm of Memories - 8:58
- Forsaken - 11:15
Individual evidence
- ↑ Matthias Olejnik: Enslaved - show cover ( Memento of the original from November 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , July 11, 2012, accessed December 12, 2012.
- ↑ a b c d e f g RobInjection: ENSLAVED Announce New Album, Riitiir , July 11, 2012, accessed December 2, 2012.
- ^ Robert Müller: Enslaved . RIITIIR . In: Metal Hammer , September 2012.
- ↑ a b c Christoph Meul: Enslaved - Riitiir , accessed on December 2, 2012.
- ↑ a b c d e Christoph Meul: Enslaved - Interview with Ivar and Grutle about "Riitiir" ( Memento of the original from October 14, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , September 19, 2012, accessed December 12, 2012.
- ↑ a b c Petra Schurer: ENSLAVED . RIITIIR , September 19, 2012, accessed December 2, 2012.
- ↑ a b c Boris Kaiser: Enslaved . Just a moment . In: Rock Hard , No. 305, October 2012, SS 27.
- ↑ a b Robert Müller: Enslaved interview on the new album RIITIIR , September 26, 2012, accessed on December 24, 2012.
