Pagan metallers Helritt hail from Thuringia, Germany, and threw their debut album for metal hordes back in 2006. I'm familiar with two pagan metal bands from the area; my favorite Menhir, and Surturs Lohe. Actually the five guys of Helritt left Surturs Lohe to form a band of their own. What combines all these three bands besides their domicile is how they sound, generally.

Helritt play heavy metal with black metal influences. Melodic guitar work evokes the dreams of past times, when pagan gods inhabited the Northern parts of Europe, and is very similar with the aforementioned bands. It's the Thuringian sound, I guess. The epic, at times folky, guitar melodies are very hummable, and many are accompanied by basic hollering clean vocals. The other vocal style is black metal shrieking, which isn't very atrocious, but more like more human version of Mayhem's Maniac, a bit too gremlin-esque. Anyways, Helritt do not water down their metal with folk music instruments, and there's just acoustic intro and outro, plus some odd acoustic bits. Double kick drum action is heard a lot, even though the music's pace varies from fast to mid-paced. The songs are kept pretty simple in their structure. There's surely hooks in music, but still the band operate in a pretty narrow spectrum, and under 40 minutes of this could get a tad plain at times. And that is the album's biggest drawback. Gladly there are heabangable moments like 'Berge' and 'Ehrvoller Weg' along the way, but there are great moments in every song.

The performances are packed with energy. Instruments and the vocals have more or less echo in their sound, giving this a feel of played outdoors. Drums could have been more punchy, because, especially during blast beats, the bass drums get somewhat lost. The booklet contains loads of nature photography in black and white, and the lyrics are printed in runic writing... The lyrics all in German, and are based on Norse mythology, so expect Loki, Ymir, Wotan and the rest of the cast appear in the texts, and the history of Thuringia and the area's nature. My German is "a bit" rusty, so I'm not commenting more accurately on the writings.

'Trotzend dem Niedergang' is partly a awesome piece of German pagan metal, but it does repeat itself pretty heavily. The future will show, if the band can sally forth towards more varying musical landscapes, or stick onto the same recipe. Hopefully there's some adventuring spirit in Helritt's fellows! To cut it short: Pagan metal fans should inspect Helritt.

Rating: 7 (out of 10) ratings explained

Reviewed by Lane
08/06/2008 19:23