Album Review: Primordial - How It Ends
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Excuse me for a moment while I wipe the tears from my eyes.I’m making no bones about my love of Primordial from the outset and consider the release of a new record by the Irish lads to be an event in itself. With now more than thirty-years under their collected belts and it having been five years since last album, Exile Among the Ruins, it was high-time we got a new collection and How It Ends feels like a return to the mid-noughties and the one-two release of classics The Gathering Wilderness and To the Nameless Dead.
For album number ten, Primordial are a four-piece following the departure of long-time guitarist, Michael O'Floinn, leaving original member, Ciáran MacUiliam to handle guitar duties alone. Otherwise, How It Ends is the very record you would expect: it’s humbling in its vastness and the ambition of the ten songs is matched only by the passion Primordial enshrine within every one of their compositions.
Opening with the title track, we are presented with a sweeping and epic vista. Rolling drums accompany crunching guitars and a musical canvass it laid out upon which Nemtheanga can rage against the world. His unique vocal style is that of a fired-up herald and How It Ends is a stark warning that there is a storm coming in and asks who has the stomach for the inevitable fight?
It’s a theme that permeates most of the record and can be identified in the defiant titles such as We Shall Not Serve, All Against All and Victory Has a 1000 Sons, Defeat is an Orphan.
Compositions are huge, nihilistic symphonies, in which Pól MacAmhlaigh’s bass and Simon Ó Laoghaire’s drums are almost supernaturally in-sync. The bass core of All Against All gives the song an unexpected groove and, oddly, the Blackest of the album’s tracks. There are hints of Sweden’s Shining breaking through in the mid-section and, although we don’t go fully back to the Imrama debut, there are infusions of Infernal Summer and Let the Sun Set on Life Forever on show.
Ploughs to Rust, Swords to Dust comes over a call to arms as much as a lament for the past, as excoriating vocals rip through the low end of the song and supplement itsuncompromising nature. We Shall Not Serve follows like a dropped bomb and ramps up the tempo through a Gods to the Godless-style guitar pattern and a choppy mid-section. Rousseau’s statement that: “Man was born free, and he is forever in chains”, and countered by Shelley’s reminder that “we are many, they are few” forms the central thesis of this song of staunch defiance.
Clearly, How It Ends deals with large themes and needs a board canvass up which to express them fully. There are no compromises when it comes to song length, as anyone with knowledge of Primordial will attest, rather each track is permitted the space to play itself out, repeating riffs and pushing ideas to their breaking point.
A Call to Cernunnos has the listener taken back into Primordial’s past and to a time when worship of the horned god took place. A fat low end gives a platform for a timeless sound, one that adopts an early modern aesthetic and a choral interlude, which conjures images of invocations to ancient deities.
The instrumental Traidisiúnta acts as an elongated introduction to the dirge of Pilgrimage to the World’s End, where a mournful guitar laments the deportation of convicts from nineteenth century Irish shores. Death Holy Death picks up this sound and has a brooding, molasses-dripping riffeventually ushering in some of the classic rock ideas Alan ran with on Twilight of the Gods’ record.
Nothing New Under the Sun shirks its programming and proves itself to be a step away from the rest of the record, and Victory has 1000 Fathers, Defeat is an Orphan closes out the album with a nod to the Emerald Isle and proudly wears its Heavy Metal heart for all to see.
Primordial have made a career of being staunchly uncompromising and How It Ends doesn’t see the band deviating from their chosen path. Like My Dying Bride or Katatonia, Primordial’s music can be alienating to first-time listeners but, like introducing a goldfish to a new environment, acclimatisation is the key. Understand that these songs aren’t really meant to be instantaneous, rather they are supposed to lodge into your brain and be explored by repeated expose. And I look forward to prolonged and repeated exposed to How It Ends over the next few years.
