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Rating: My passion for Borknagar, lately, knows no bounds.
I spend my days listening to their entire body of work up to the latest "Origin," tracing back through their entire career and related projects by each member. Fanatic? Probably.
In my excursions into the past that, thanking any amorphous deity, always change for the better for Borknagar, today I stopped at "The Archaic Course".
I stopped and listened, wondering if one could emotionally love an album, having only had two or three songs from the CD for a long time, therefore unable to judge it in its entirety, but always imagining how great it could have been in its cryptic and monumental mass.
Now that I have everything and have all the elements in hand to give an opinion in a calm manner about what has been done, I must say that the premises, perhaps the illusions, let's call them that, I had built up have surpassed my most optimistic expectations.
The tracks I already possessed before were "Oceans Rise", "Universal", and "The Black Token" and, just for these three alone, I say immediately to avoid any posthumous second thoughts, they are worth the entire purchase, not just of this album, but of the band's entire discography.
Certainly, one needs a fairly trained ear to understand and fully appreciate the extraordinary and prolific inspired, refined, and eclectic vein that guides the hand of Øystein G. Brun, always the mind behind this wonderful and monumental musical project.
The tracks prove to be always aggressive, structured in a powerful way even if not excessively intricate (although, truth be told, both before and after the release of this work, Borknagar has shown they can compose incredibly intricate and monstrously conceived sound architectures), with a marked tendency not to deny their "Black" roots, while indulging extensively in fields "contaminated" by synths, organs, and profuse melody.
And this is the first winning card that the band shows without proving to have any problem.
The second is, at least in this context, the vocal performance of singer ICS Vortex, who later joined Dimmu Borgir as a bassist and second vocalist and, in his spare time, worked with Arcturus. Vortex has the task here of filling the evident gap left by his previous colleague Garm (now with Ulver), and with skill and passion, he does not make one miss his predecessor at all, rather. The levels of singing settle at medium-high levels in any part you want to look at them: both in "Scream" and clean, with an enviable tendency to high and suffering tones, which contribute, if you will, to the high rate of drama and the dreamlike visions with which this album is permeated.
In "Oceans Rise" one can clearly perceive the "northern" atmosphere, cold and warring of ancestral medieval periods lost in memory and covered by the dust of forgetfulness. A purely symphonic and Black interlude precedes an airy and sweeping ride on epic grounds transfigured by images that only Borknagar can create, in a notable crescendo and according to a scheme that cannot fail to leave listeners amazed.
But if "Oceans Rise" was an appetizing bite and marked the path the band clearly intended to take, it is with "Universal" that Vortex overflows toward unreachable shores made of suffering and blurred monsters of despair and pain. Compared to the complex and epic structure that requires maneuvering through passages never the same, the chorus is a gem made of the most precious existing metal, with all those chilling high notes, singing of things seen but conceived objectively and tragically:
"Rivers longer than blood can flow
Horizons wider than complete wisdom
A distance of furious dreams
Isolated fields in convulsive motion"
A dream. A catharsis longer than the most impetuous rivers of blood color.
And it doesn't end here.
All the tracks emphasize heavily on the epic and universal aspect of things, managing with every little step to create scenarios upon scenarios, without losing in power or skill, but rather adding more and more, and the examples, if you want some, abound with every second that passes: "The Black Token", "Ad Noctum" with its elusive organ, "Winter Millenium" with its methodical ferocity and its "liquid" yet fierce guitars.
All tracks that remain in the heart, scratch it, and martyr it, diluting the pain in soporific feelings of bewilderment and consternation. But it is a dying with pride, albeit with resignation, and only a few, only very few, gifted like Borknagar, have managed to express its meaning with such completeness.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
01 Oceans Rise (05:27)
Deify the depths of intimate caprice
The noble morsel of the grand eternity
Face the furious and black domain
From where all the wisdom once came
As a weak and stunning flare
Yet so completed and clear
In the eyes of the elementary existence
May the fallen of eternity explode
As primal instincts of devotion
Where the seeds of chaos blow
Where the almighty substance flow
When the oceans rise
And thunder calls
The shape of furious manners fall
Where the oceans rise
Between dimensions asunder
The maze of fragmented flare
Harvest the pain of the will and despair
Where the seeds of chaos grow
Where the almighty substance bow
Milleniums are falling
Milleniums are calling
Hail!
The dawn of a new era
03 The Witching Hour (04:26)
In the hour before dawn
The Nordic mirror lies black yet calm
Reflects my shadow and heaven above
The frost force the ocean up
Past the shores towards the mountain tops
Spirals flash green glittering blitz never seen
By the eyes of the selfpronounced clean
Through shining mists past the planet of witz
Mysterious realms still exist
In this black and blue void schiziod creatures will toy
With fragments of what once where souls
Dreamlike I follow their path dark and hallow
My feet barely touch the ground
Ride the radiant waves into unexplored space
Obscure scenery changes
Into trance without end to lunatics glen
Spellbound I kneel down in pain
The lurkers and I
Become one
As a hunters eye like the moon
Together we ride the storm
magic unfolds at the crack of dawn
Reborn
Like my fathers before me
I am shown the way
05 Nocturnal Vision (04:34)
The path was foreseen
In a feverish dream
and the riddle was shown
To the seven year grown
Reaching out for the thread he saw
It would cut through his fingers
As a razor sharp straw
Shaping the untouchable
Embracing the none-existable
It's force force drains
Slide into forever
Surface to surface
Nothing between
Faling forever
The illusion has been
But a fragment of time
On the thread of life
None shall pass
This fiery wall
None shall pass
No, none at all
07 Winter Millenium (05:43)
Through milleniums of winter so waste
I have passed eras to following time
I have faced the force of the nocturnal course
Where the winter comes resounding
On the plains of the earthly wisdom
I have walked the silence yet furious fields
Seen the children of the cold
The elder and the bold
Burning by belief, yearning by deceit
Behind each embracing creature
I saw thousand fighting beasts
I saw the furious black colours
Like the jaws of a bloody feast
At the end of mans wisdom
I saw passion fly so terrible high
I heard sorrow groan
At the end which I found
Where live convulse resound
I came from a distance in time
From the hill where the sun for the first time came through
I followed every wind to every spot it blew
I rove the eternity of time, the history of existence
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