Borknagar
The Archaic Course

THE REVIEW

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.