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Review: Primordial - Where Greater Men Have Fallen
Primordial
www.primordialofficial.com
Where Greater Men Have Fallen

Label: Metal Blade Records
Year released: 2014
Duration: 58:38
Tracks: 8
Genre: Pagan Metal

Rating:
3/5


Review online: December 3, 2014
Reviewed by: MetalMike
Readers' Rating
How do you rate this release?

Rated 3.98/5 (79.58%) (48 Votes)
Review

I'm new to Ireland's Epic/Black Metal band Primordial but since I've heard good things about them, I was looking forward to their 2014 release, Where Greater Men Have Fallen. I've now listened to it several times and can't, for the life of me, figure out what the big deal is. The music is atmospheric and epic, with huge riffs, especially on tracks like "Born to Night" and the mood is grim and foreboding, but the songs themselves are long and tend to wander around aimlessly. The attempts at building tension, like starting songs with sparse and/or acoustic passages, often don't work because the band comes blasting in instead of slowly building. The vocals are clear and not unlike Messiah Marcolin or Phil Swanson, in that they aren't necessarily pitch-perfect and that's OK, I dig the organic approach, but these vocals just aren't particularly well suited to the music. It sounds like the singer is trying just a bit too hard. At the end of the day, I just can't say Where Greater Men Have Fallen has left me wanting to hear it again. There isn't anything on it that is particularly bad but nothing particularly great, either. The album makes me think of a cross between Atlantean Kodex and Summoning without capturing what makes either of those bands special.

I'm told previous albums, like To the Nameless Dead, are not to be missed and I hope to someday go back and perhaps see what the big deal is. Maybe Where Greater Men Have Fallen will make more sense once I've done that. Until then, I don't hear much that would make me choose this over The White Goddess or Old Mornings Dawn.

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