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Released on November 25, 2014 via Metal Blade Records
Ireland’s Primordial have been issuing epic rallying cries in the Celtic and black metal veins for more than 20 years now, but my first time hearing them came just earlier this fall in the form of the title track from their eighth album, ‘Where Greater Men Have Fallen’. That song—a candidate for album-opener of the year—makes for a grand, if long overdue, first impression. Like the album it leads off, ‘Where Greater Men Have Fallen’ is a charging and thundering thing, powerful and melodic and relentless.
Striking with the deliberate force of a blacksmith’s hammer, that song serves as a pounding introduction to this collection of darkened paeans to combat and legacy. Here is a record that has on more than one occasion stirred me to the point of putting down my headphones, exhaling and getting up to rummage through the closet for my own chainmail vest and flagon of beer. Where Greater Men Have Fallen is the timeless sound of a different age. Or, conversely, listening to it gives me the uncanny impression that I myself am a different age, because my 16-year-old self would have flipped for this record.
My relationship with metal started out the same way I expect a lot of people’s relationships with comic books do—rooted in boredom and escapism. Whatever it was that my friends found in the righteous-doings of the superheroes who populated the colored pages that they spent so much time reading, that’s what I found in the guitar heroes who could fight off shyness and reticence from the digital tracks of my bedroom CD player. The bands that held my rapturous teenage attention the longest were always those with a cinematic flair for musical storytelling. Primordial don’t sound much like any of those bands, but they do have their own flair and they do know how to explode it into its own heroic world.
That world is filled with dangers and injustices. Across the album’s eight tracks and 60 minutes, which are by turns post-apocalyptic and antediluvian, storms brew, blood runs, famine starves and flesh withers. You can hear the threat of violence with every passing bar, be its perpetrator human (‘The Seed of Tyrants’), natural (‘Come the Flood’) or spiritual (‘Wielding Lightning to Split the Sun’). What distinguishes the decidedly triumphant music of Primordial is that the band embraces those threats as opportunities for glory.
It’s no secret that Primordial has an absolute belter in vocalist Alan Averill, aka A.A. Nemtheanga. Seriously, the guy has a pair of furnaces for lungs. But his emotional performance here would be for naught were the music not the worthy counterpart that it is. The guitar work, for example, is nuanced and fleet. From the arpeggiated build of ‘Babel’s Tower’, to the wilfully restrained strums of ‘Come the Flood’, guitarists Ciáran MacUiliam and Micheál Ó Floinn play skillfully, never showily. When they do take center stage, as in the second-to-last minute of ‘Babel’, they shine. The same goes for the rhythm section: the muted passage at the 4:30 mark of ‘Ghosts of the Charnel House’ remains, after repeat listens, a standout moment.
Music of Primordial’s scale occupies a weird space in relationship to 21st century urban domestic life, to say nothing of my own adulthood. Ten years ago, when I was still a teenager and still coming up in the open-aired (almost) middle of nowhere, I would have latched like a leech onto this record’s Romantic strains and soaring melodies. Today, I still find myself latching, but I typically do so behind closed doors, maybe while scouring dishes for bacterial hordes or vanquishing floor stains of known origin. Not exactly valorous, these boring scenes. But then, where exactly do we locate valor, once we switch off the record player and return to society?
As a soundtrack to modern living in the peaceful backwaters of an amoral empire, the battlefield-ready Where Greater Men Have Fallen makes more sense than you’d think. It is an inspiring and surprisingly meditative album that compels the best even amid circumstances that are the worst. While Primordial continue to add to and better what is probably already a formidable and memorable legacy, their music serves as a reminder that each of us have legacies of our own to forge and drive.
