Enslaved
Yggdrasill

THE REVIEW

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...