Aspera Hiems Symfonia

Arcturus was a legendary supergroup, a side project of musicians who had their main work in other bands. Aspera Hiems Symfonia was their avant-garde black-metal masterpiece. This album doesn't need any review; it's a classical album. Anyway, I just wanted to write a few lines about it.

Aspera Hiems Symfonia was released in 1996; great music, but not very good mixing and production. The album was completely re-mastered and re-released in 2002. You can buy a double CD that contains both the re-mastered and original versions (and a couple of good bonus tracks). The re-mastering really brought out the greatness of the music. It is an album where all songs are very good, it's not often you find that. The music is black metal at the core, but has more than you expect from the typical old-school black-metal albums from the 1990's.

The music is symphonic and melodic, carried by distorted lead guitars, with great solo sections. The brilliant (electric) piano played by Sverd adds spice on top of the guitars. The drumming by Hellhammer is brilliant as always, with nicely timed blast beats, and precisely underlining mid-song changes in beat and tempo. The grim-vocals by Garm has just the right desperation to match the mood of the songs.

I have listened through this album about a thousend times, never getting tired of it, one of my all-time favorites. I listen to it now, as I write. It is impossible to pick one single song as the high-light, every track on the album is one. Below, I have included a YouTube link to one of the songs, picked more or less at random: Whence and Wither Goest the Wind

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zJ0vqJWwAM

And since only one song can't make justice to this album; here is another one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXHng1Vz3II

Enjoy !!! >:)