Primordial - Where Greater Men Have Fallen - Vinyl

Primordial aren't a new band. They've been around upwards of 20 years, and Where Greater Men Have Fallen is their eighth album. By some accounts, they're Ireland's first-ever black metal band. Primordial aren't really a black metal band, at least at this point, but they're perfectly capable of launching into that hummingbird-blastbeat moody-noise thing. They really find liftoff, though, on a song like quot;Ghosts Of The Charnel Housequot; - locking into a dinosaur-stomp riff, playing it slowly enough that it can really connect, and then letting frontman Alan Averill just open up his throat and howl.Averill has a set of pipes on him. The singer, who sometimes goes by the ungainly moniker A.A. Nemtheanga, is a classic metal wailer in the mold of Ronnie James Dio or Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson. We don't hear too many voices like his anymore: A full-bodied, high-pitched swooping eagle of a thing, a voice that makes everything around it sound bigger. When the band turns toward minor-key churn and Averill has to resort to something like the standard present-day Cookie Monster growl, as on a song like quot;The Alchemist's Head,quot; Averill can do that just fine.The rest of the band has that vastness in them, too. While Averill, at least on this album, is very much an old-school metal frontman, the rest of the band doesn't seem to feel like they need to go all imitation-Dio to keep up with him. Primordial could be a great retro-metal band, but then they'd still sound like a pale imitation of their influences. Instead, they evoke those old sounds when they need to, but they never sound beholden to them. Even in deep-crunch mode, there's a slight black-metal enervated restlessness to the way they play. And they know how to hold back, too. quot;Born To Night,quot; the album's longest song at nine minutes, opens with nearly four minutes of atmospheric mandolin strums before they drop the hammer and a monolithic riff bulldozes in out of nowhere. Averill barely sings on quot;Born To Night,quot; and yet you don't really miss him, since his voice is deployed so effectively.