Album Review: Iselder - The 38th Division
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
I’m not the sunny type. I wear too much black for hot weather, and the close, humid climate Britain subjects us to in the summer months is torturous for me. So, coming into the hotter slots on the calendar, what better way to introduce some blessed frigidity than with that frostiest of genres – black metal. So here is Iselder to waft some hopefully rather chilly winds in my general direction; how do they fare?
I’ve been going back and forth on this one, because I can’t decide whether Iselder’s stripped-down back-to-basics black metal is exactly what the doctor ordered or if it’s a bit too thin on imagination. Possibly both. Their style enables them to be forceful and direct, which suits their embittered message, but it also straight-jackets them, prevents them from landing on a more singular identity outside of their Welsh-centric themes. For sure, it’s hard to argue against the Immortal-tinged frostbite of upbeat fare like “Impending War”, it’s incisor-sharp riffs ridged with permafrost. There’s good stuff here, no doubt. But it struggles to distinguish itself from its peers overall because there just isn’t much about it that’s new, original, or – unfortunately – exceptional.
Iselder do a thing that I like, but with the best will in the world to them, I’m struggling to connect with it. It feels like it will nail a good section, filled with righteous invective, but then lose steam when it has to move on from that riff. Take “Call to Arms” for example - it opens like the razing of Christendom, massacres amongst the holy host, blood upon the altar, all that good shit. But then then at 1.31 the momentum stalls. The position consolidates. It’s not bad, but the step back from scorched earth tactics is noticeable and forces a brake check into the mix. The song is essentially 3 riffs repeated, and when one of which feels like a smoke break, it gives the overall track this odd sense of being a little underdeveloped while also checking it’s own velocity twice. It’s true that I prefer it when the songs fire off like a sprint team being chased by randy bears, but even under the best circumstances, these riffs feel a bit stock standard. Phrasings that have been common parlance from the moment we all first sighted a Blaze in the Northern Sky, martial rhythms Marduk built a career around, so on and so forth. I can get on board with it when it’s at it’s most frantic, but even then I’m only ever at half-mast. “Embrace the End” has some tasty swaps between it’s verse and chorus and a suitably bombastic tempo, but it’s so philopatric that I find myself calling to mind the usual classics as points of reference, then wondering why I’m not just listening to them instead.
The best black metal sends a man scurrying back to Christ. It’s misanthropy scrawled on frost-clad cliff faces, blood flash-freezing to red snowflakes as it sprays into wind-whipped air. What Iselder presents is a competent addition to the style, but you can’t rise beyond your roots when you’ve nailed yourself to them. Which isn’t to say that I could do better, but these guys definitely could. I’d not suggesting that they need to get madly into King Crimson albums and fly off on esoteric tangents, but shit, maybe hitting the psychedelics and seeing where their talents could take them wouldn’t be the worst plan in the world. Iselder obviously have a top-shelf album in them in terms of their ability to play their instruments, but on this one at least their compositional skills sadly haven’t delivered the goods.
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