Nordvargr
Awaken
3.2
Awaken has to easily be a reviewers worst nightmare. What the hell is this?! Imagine all those sounds you made up in your head that you claimed you heard in the basement and then pretend they are on a CD. That is what this is. The man behind Nordvargr calls it “dark ambient nightmares and haunting soundscapes,” which makes perfect sense. There is no other way to describe this. It is just a lot of goddamned noise flowing out of the speakers. Do I enjoy this? Well, I still am not entirely all too sure. I have listened to this a couple times and I am still just not sure what to make of it. Now I have to admit I have never heard anything quite like this before, so it does get points for originality. Does this music even have a substantial following? Seriously, who wants to sit down and listen to noise? It is like buying one of those CDs with birds chirping on it that you see in nature stores. Albums like Awaken must cater to people that want their noise to be more extreme than birds chirping I guess. To me this seems like one big soundtrack to a movie I have never seen. The music just plods along and feels ultimately like background music. I do not think I could ever just sit down and listen to this. It does not evoke anything in me… ever, other than the question “Why the hell am I listening to a CD of noise?” I thought hey, maybe I could listen to this while I do some homework because it would be perfect for just some background noise to destroy the silence. Well, it still left me with the same question as I asked above, but it still never angered me to the point of where I thought about actually throwing the CD out the window, like some lack-luster bands have done. Then that still raises the question, do I like this or not? Well, goddamnit, I just cannot give a solid answer. Right now, I am listening to this at four in the morning with the lights off. I haven’t slept in almost 24 hours, I’m a little edgy, and at times this creeps me out a little, but still, I’ve heard this album enough times to know when the clanks and crashes out of no where are going to occur so they no longer will make me jump. So now I am thinking, this has lost any value it may have had left. Although I suppose I could play it next Halloween and see if the “cave noises” will creep out any of the kids that come to the door, mostly likely not, but it’s worth a try. Now onto scoring. How can you score something like this? Is it hard to make noise sound good? Its just noise. I suppose there are some intricacies to the production, like the occasional chanting type stuff in the background, so the album gets points for that. Also, I know that music like this isn’t just made over night, you have to have some idea of what you're doing with keyboards and the computer and different filters to create this sound and try to string it together making some sense of it. However, does it really take any sense of musicianship to string together some sounds on the computer? To me it doesn’t, but I guess the ability to string sounds together in some sense gives you a better rating in the songwriting department than it does the musicianship department. Well, after almost a page of nonsense, I am still not sure what to make of this album. I cannot say that I can really recommend it, unless you like noise. If you like noise and always wanted to hear what noise would be like recorded on a CD, then this will be your album of the year, because there’s tons of noise here to offer. Especially on the last track, “Seeds of Blood (Acts 1-4).” With that epic, you get 16 minutes of noise. So, in conclusion, if you like noise or want to pretend you live in a cave, buy this.
