Pieces Of Primal

Although they've wallowed in the shadows of better-known Scandinavian extreme metal bands like Emperor and Dimmu Borgir due to inferior promotion and internal problems, Sweden's Mork Gryning have accomplished quite a bit over the course of their four-album career. Like these and other champions of that region's exciting local scene, Mork Gryning's core creative duo of Goth Gorgon and Draakh Kimera meld death and black metal with a vast array of less obvious styles: industrial, doom, symphonic, and even more traditional thrash metal riffing among them. While proving somewhat difficult to digest at times, this eclectic sonic soup is certainly never boring, and often downright thrilling. Opener "The Sleeping Star," for instance, smacks of Swiss death metal industrialists Samael jamming with Paradise Lost, while the furiously paced black metal of "The Cradle of Civilization" bridges the gap between Dimmu's complex orchestrations and Marduk's straightforward bludgeoning before descending into a delicately mournful, string quartet-led coda. The same variety of disparate stylistic tricks permeates the reigning, primal aggression underpinning every single song that follows, be it the hypnotically organic grooves of "Our Urn," the dense harmonies and ambient nuances of "An Old Man's Lament," the fancy-free power chords and chorused vocals of "The Worm," or even the gothic overtones and Baroque keyboards heard on "Fragments and Pieces." Simply put, the resourceful invention to be found on Pieces of Primal Expressionism can easily challenge any and all of Mork Gryning's competition in modern extreme metal. ~ Eduardo Rivadavia