Gnipahålan, Flögo De Bort, Sweden, Ancient Records (2015) / Germany, Purity Through Fire, PTF059 (2016)
Gnipahålan looks like a new group but its two members have long CVs playing in other bands. “Flögo De Bort” is the first of two cassettes Gnipahålan has released so far and consists of two fairly similar-sounding songs. The style is raw and distorted melodic ambient BM dominated by wild raging banshee vocals. The music has a strong garage quality with lots of clanging and clashing cymbals, a strong bass sound and a roaring hellish guitar over the top. Both musicians play as if their very lives depended on playing as fast and chaotically as they can, though both songs are more structured than what initially appears.
Track 1 is a forceful, surging song of blaring drone strings, ever-changing rhythms and beats that sometimes achieve hyper blast-beat levels, and screeching voices that bleed into the music around them. The vocals are not very clear and can be very ragged to the point of disintegrating into loose threads and strips. The song has a desperate mood as it charges madly towards its doomed end. Track 2 is a weeny bit slower with a more limping rhythm and a more settled, less harried feel. The drumming is the most outstanding feature and the guitars boom out overhead. As the song develops, a melancholy mood appears about the halfway point and the screaming seems to be less angry and more agonised.
Both songs are very powerful and moving in their own way, coming out of the speakers like huge waves of full-on guitar bellow, thundering drums and intense emotion. The vocals are a bit thin and restricted in their range for this style of strongly epic raw BM, and the shrieking does get tedious. While two songs might not be enough for folks to make a full judgement call on what Gnipahålan is capable of, beneath the roaring distortion they are quite complex in their rhythms and riffing, and the music expresses emotion surprisingly well.