The formidable Danish band Crocell released their debut album The God We Drowned in 2008, and then followed that with new full-lengths every two or three years, culminating in their fifth album Relics in 2018. Keeping to that pattern, we might have expected a new album in 2021, but that year they instead brought us a pair of four-song EPs on the same day (reviewed here).
Now, however, three years later, we do have a new Crocell album, and it will be coming out on June 28th via the band’s new label Emanzipation Productions. Its name is Of Frost, Of Flame, Of Flesh, and today we’re presenting it in its entirety.
The lineup of Crocell has remained pretty steady since the band’s inception, though the new album seems to mark the first recording appearance in the Crocell ranks of guitarist Mads Gath (from Heaven’s Damnation and Urkraft) and bassist Uffe Laustsen-Jensen. Yet their music has evolved significantly over time.
To get some sense of that evolution you could read the 8 articles we’ve written about Crocell‘s music, beginning with Andy‘s Synn Report about them in 2012, which covered their first two albums. And that evolution really hasn’t ever come to a halt, a point you could vividly grasp by listening to the differences between those two EPs simultaneously released in 2021.
At a high level you could say that the band have moved into a deeper (and especially harrowing) union of black and death metal, but without sacrificing the importance of emotionally evocative melody (and hooks) that have been central to their sound from the beginning, back when you’d have branded them a melodic death metal band. So what have they done on this new album?
Emanzipation Productions recommends the album for fans of Necrophobic, Marduk, Bölzer, and God Dethroned, and those are some pretty good clues to what lies ahead (we might also add early Dissection to that list). As those references suggest, and as you might also suspect if you listened to those two previous EPs, the songs on the album aren’t all in exactly the same musical vein, which is one reason why the album is such a gripping experience, start to finish.
With the opener “Search Of Solace“, Crocell create a big rumbling audio behemoth, brutish and bleak, which then explodes into a war-charge of deliriously violent riffing, obliterating drums, humongously heavy bass undulations, scalding screams, and ravenous roars.
Back and forth the music goes, with the guitars piercing the mind and seeming to wail as well as ravish. But the song’s most memorable aspect might be how it transforms yet again, beginning with a slow and beleaguered guitar-bridge that becomes the basis for a grim yet ringing harmony that really gets its dark hooks in the head. Even with the visceral grooves that persist, it’s a spellbinding experience, as entrancing as it is stricken.
From there, the music builds toward greater torment and turbulence, almost glorious in its sound but then shattering, with vocals so intense that they send shivers down the spine.
That opening song is a vivid display of the production qualities evident on the album as a whole, which deliver bowel-loosening heaviness and power, as well as striking clarity in the guitars and explosive vocal intensity.
Stylistically, the opener also establishes that dire union of black and death metal referred to above, a union that persists in the grim and violent maneuvers of “Chanting Fire“. But like the opener, “Chanting Fire” moves into other phases — phases of soul-splintering agony, confusion, and pain. The vocals, if anything, are also even more unhinged in their intensity.
The muscular grooves and dark, ringing melodies haven’t gone anywhere, though. They’re both important parts of “Claws Of Piety” and “Serpent’s Hunger“, which are feral and ferocious but also dire and downfallen.
“Claws of Piety” also achieves the kind of sweep that makes its heartache epic in scope, and the kind of ice-storm atmosphere that brings the cold north to mind, while “Serpent’s Hunger” is more blazing and blasting in its frenzies, and more cruel in its attack. Once again, the array of shattering screams, wild wails, and imperious roars in those songs (as everywhere) raise goosebumps.
Those opening four songs have more in common than they do differences, but “Vortex” — the album’s longest song — demonstrates that the band haven’t abandoned the diversity of interests that caused them to release two separate EPs in 2021 instead of attempting to unify them in a single album.
While “Vortex” is often a ruinous discharge, reaching harrowing zeniths of crazed calamity, it also includes phases in which unsettling electronics hold sway, creating nightmarish sonic hallucinations. The whirring lead-guitar, backed by a military snare pattern, still surfaces to channel splintering sorrow, and the mood is maybe even more broken and bereft, making the song as a whole one of the album’s darkest tracks.
We didn’t really mean to embark on a track-by-track review, but it’s too probably late to stop, so we’ll add that the defiant gallop “Of Frost, Of Flame, Of Flesh” is home to a fantastic (albeit heart-braking) guitar solo, and “Fierce Desire” brings forward punk influences that have been present in some of Crocell‘s past music, melded with bursts of black metal ferocity and another gripping (and this time, shredtastic) guitar solo. There’s laughter at the end of that song, and maybe it’s because it will probably catch you off-guard here near the album’s end.
You might think that because the final song is named “Epilogue“, it’s one of those throw-away instrumental outros that some bands stitch onto the tail end of a release. It is indeed an instrumental track, but it’s no throw-away, and instead the most “epic” experience on the album. Yet (as we hear it) it’s the kind of stirring “epic” that seems to narrate the aftermath of some terrible ancient conflict, conjuring visions of ice-bound plains littered with the dead and dying.
Well, that was a big bushel of words, wasn’t it? For those who just skipped over all of them to get down to the player, we’ll add a quick summing-up that draws on some adjectives we’ve already used:
Crocell‘s new album is a viscerally powerfully, emotionally harrowing, melodically memorable, and vocally shattering hybrid of black and death metal, often as dark and cold as harsh winter nights but just as often blazing like defiant bonfires that keep the night away.
CROCELL is:
Asbjørn Steffensen – vocals
Tommy Christensen – guitar
Mads B. H. Gath – guitar
Uffe Laustsen-Jensen – bass
Andreas Posselt – drums
Of Frost, Of Flame, Of Flesh was produced, mixed, and mastered by Tue Madsen at Antfarm Studios, a birthplace of albums by such bands as Aborted, HatesSphere, Moonspell, Illdisposed, Panzerchrist, and many more.
Emanzipation Productions will release the on gatefold LP (transluscent blue vinyl, limited to 300 copies), 8-panel digipack CD, and digital formats on June 28th. Find pre-order info via the links below.
PRE-ORDER:
Digital: https://orcd.co/cro-offr
Webshop: https://bit.ly/crcl-of
CROCELL:
https://crocelldk.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/crocelldk
https://www.instagram.com/crocelldk/