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Rating: Yggdrasill by Enslaved, although it is a full-fledged album (6 tracks; 41 minutes), is unfortunately only available in "split" with the poor The Forest Is My Throne by Satyricon. So, why dedicate a review to what might seem nothing more than a trivial demo by a (then) little-known Norwegian group in their very early days?
Elementary: because Yggdrasill is the "Viking".
Forget Bathory, Thyrfing, Windir, Moonsorrow, and so on; the originality of the proposal, and its primordial nature, make it an unrepeatable, incomparable hapax.
"Heresies!" someone might think. No, because Yggdrasill, unique, represents and exemplifies the violent quest for the ancestral, the power of the myth from which it directly comes (Snorri's Edda, for the more interested and cultured).
Because Yggdrasill is pure (strictu sensu) romantic inspiration, idealized and idealizing, of a fantastic, unspoiled North, and unfortunately, now as then, unreal.
Because Yggdrasill is the physical and semantic marriage between descriptive music (cf. Greig, Sibelius) and musical violence (cf. MayheM, Immortal); the roughness of the production or the technical inexperience, naturally, does not matter.
Because Yggdrasill speaks in an unprecedented language of an ancient, ruthless ice, that ice so dear to Enslaved (cf. Frost and Isa, the fundamental albums, literally "frost" and "ice").
The titles of these lethal, cold delights (for refined palates, of course):
I Heimdallr
II Allfqdr Odinn
III Hal Valr
IV Niunda Heim
V Resound of Gjallarhorn
VI Enslaved
Ita stat vobis, since after the insufficient paraphrase, the indescriptive adjective, the mangled word that violates the sense of Art (and this art), nothing remains but to sit attentively, turn up the volume, and wait...
the Vikings...
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
01 Heimdallr ()
Heimdall is the name of an Old Norse God;
he is called the Old White Norse God;
he is great and holy;
his teeth are made of gold;
his horse is named Goldtop.
He lives where it's called the mountain in the sky besides
Bifrost.
He needs less sleep than a bird;
he sees night as clear as day
one thousand miles away from where he is;
he also hear the grass grow from the soil,
or the wool on the sheep and everything that can be heard.
He possess the horn that is called the Gjallarhorn,
and they can hear him blowing the horn in all the homes.
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