Myrkgrav is one of those little gems to come out of the underground Black/Folk Metal sub-genre, similar in style and tone to my darling bands Voluspaa and Nàttsòl (and sharing a few members between them too!). With a second full-length due . . . some point in the future, I thought I'd take a look at the one man band's first album, Trollskau, Skrømt og Kølabrenning. While mastermind Lars Jensen is extremely critical of his own work and even once referred to this album as crap, I find it to be anything but!

Let's get the negative out of the way first. One of the main complaints about this album is that it overuses similar song structures and as such can feel a little bloated and repetitive, especially around the middle. While I do agree to some extent, I believe there is enough variety to be found in here to satisfy even the most cynical Folk Metal fan. Despite lacking the veritable avalanche of folk instruments and synths found in bands such as Moonsorrow or Equilibrium (Myrkgrav being mostly made up of occasional backing keyboards and acoustic/clean guitar), the meat of the music here is brimming with soulful and heart-string-tugging melodies, clean singing, and lingering chords.

Generally the songs on Trollskau... are in the 4/5 minute range and alternate and mix & match a number of passages ranging from serene clean guitars and singing all the way to ferociously fast blast-beats, evil tremolo-picked melodies and vicious rasps, albeit with plenty of middle ground. It is due to the snappy switching between all these elements that the songs don't drag on by even with such basic structures. While this is good for providing variety, it does also have the slight drawback of having less spotlight time for awesome sections (of which there are many).

As with quite a number of albums, the first track (Gygra & St. Olav) is quite representative of most of the material you will find later on. Utilizing a wide range of intensity and pacing, this song swoops, dives, and soars through a bevy of melodies both beautiful and terrible. By virtue of being the first track, it is somewhat more memorable than the next few songs, and is my first highlight until the most unique, and my personal favorite track: De To Spellemenn, a comparatively short song that cycles through a number of variations of the same theme, proving that beautiful music is beautiful no matter if sung in a layered viking chant (which by the way is the best clean singing performance on the entire album) or squealed out from a distorted guitar. The follow-up, Finnkjerringa, goes back to previous formula but with an interesting twist wherein the soft/hard switching is kept to one big instance about halfway through. This excellent streak of songs finishes with album closer Endetoner, a short but grand instrumental piece.

While the pre-production track that Lars recently released presents a different take on Black/Folk Metal than Trollskau... , if Myrkgrav's short history of improvement between their 2004 demo and this stellar debut is anything to go on, the new album will surely turn out to be one of my favorites of the year. Myrkgrav is highly recommended to all those who enjoy the more passionate and serious side of Folk/Viking Metal.