Eisregen - Abart

Angry Metal Guy 60

Some bands have history. Eisregen has lore. Terrorizing Germany for almost 30 years, core members Yantit and M.Roth have managed to get 2 of their albums restricted and 2 more outright banned in their home country. The BzKJ¹ brought down the hammer on account of the sheer fucked-up-ness of their lyrics, which feature graphic gore, necrophilia, incest, and more. I think the German government has never heard of slam, or that list would be a whole lot longer. Though I had caught Eisregen’s moniker floating about the web a few times, it wasn’t until now that I got to sample their proprietary brand of perversion. How does Abart stack up against its 15(!) predecessors?

No one has time to listen to a discography that size for reviewing a single album, but a brief perusal suggests that Eisregen is very much in the camp that won’t fix what ain’t broken. Three parts gothic metal, two parts black metal and one part death metal, the music is kept smaller than the uninitiated like myself might have expected, contrasting the amount of hoo-hah the band seems to have drawn. In hoarse, breathy rasps, the band sketches nightmarish stories like Mary Shelley turned to 11, without overt aggression or grandeur. Demure piano and violin supply a measure of haunting atmosphere and the necessary hooks to keep the tracks interesting beyond the disturbing lyrics. This is vital, as you need to speak German to understand them in the first place.

But whilst my expectations were tempered, I’ve found myself pleasantly taken with Abart. The songwriting is simple and not particularly dynamic, sticking to basic structures without significant evolution in pacing or mood, but Eisregen shows itself capable of engaging on many different levels across the well-varied tracklist. Wistful melancholy outlines “Im blutroten Raum,” yet the rambunctious “Hinterland” is suffused with a Finntroll-like sense of mischief. “Schöner sterben” is straight-up gothic doom in the vein of Paradise Lost, but “Lebendköder” hews closer to the theatrical gothic black of Cradle of Filth or Carach Angren. M.Roth’s rasp is suitably over the top, hamming up the evil characters he embodies with highly entertaining relish and over-pronunciation, but he can be surprisingly sonorous with his cleans which evoke Till Lindeman (Rammstein).

It can be hard to escape the autopilot altogether when you average an album every other year for three decades, though, and Eisregen doesn’t entirely escape a vibe of formulaic composition. The vocals are great, but clean asides aside, they have one tone and one intensity across the majority of the album. Verse-chorus structures are fine, but with the tempo and intra-track variety on display, the music can get predictable at times. The attempt at an epic closer, “Totkörperkunst,”² doesn’t have enough going for it to fill its 10-minute duration. It results in an album that is enjoyable while it’s playing but lacks the zest to outgrow itself beyond that.

Still, with the law of diminishing records in mind, Abart finds Eisregen in finer form than most bands with a discography well into double digits can lay claim to. Despite the overlong finale, there are no real duds on here, with both atmosphere and hooks plentiful and very entertaining. Even the production is well above industry standard despite the vocals sitting too far forward in the mix. As for the lyrics, the ones I’ve translated are very entertaining self-contained horror stories, such as a bolt gun serial killer and a murder-suicide by embalming, so the German audience might get more out of this one. But monolinguals, don’t let that scare you off, because Abart is a fun yet undemanding little slasher anthology that will make for a great Halloween soundtrack in a couple of months.



Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: Massacre Records
Websites: kkth.de | facebook.com/eisregen.official
Releases Worldwide: August 16th, 2024

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