Tag Archives: Black Mark Productions

Black Metal, Genre, Heavy Metal, Song Posts

Bathory – One Rode To Asa Bay

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“The God of all almightiness had arrived from a foreign land”

I often worry I use the word “epic” too much in my reviews but there is no song more deserving of the term than Bathory’s majestic One Rode To Asa Bay. The Swedish band’s seminal 1990 album Hammerheart explores Viking life, belief and mythology but its climatic track One Rode To Asa Bay depicts the arrival of a Christian missionary intent on erasing that way of life. The use of choral keyboards and relentless, driving repetition gives the song a hypnotic grandiosity and it’s impossible not to get swept up in Quorthon’s raw, impassioned storytelling. This is the extreme metal Stargazer. Epic.

Black Metal, Genre, Heavy Metal, NWOBHM, Song Posts, Thrash Metal

Bathory – Sacrifice: 1st Version

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“I spread eternal dark on Earth”

Taken from the 1984 compilation album Scandinavian Metal Attack, Sacrifice is the first recorded release from one of metal’s most revered and influential acts: Bathory.

It’s the first of two songs the Swedish band (led by mythic mastermind Quorthon) recorded for the compilation. And compared to the enjoyable trad metal performed by the other four Swedish and Finnish acts on the album, Sacrifice sounds like the next level in extremity. It’s a ballsy and chaotic rager in the style of Motorhead, Venom etc… with cavernous, noisy vocals and a catchy, evil ascending chorus riff. The label were inundated with letters demanding more from Bathory. And rightly so. This is great stuff for fans of the more punky, violent end of the NWOBHM and fans of early, primitive thrash.

But the song would go on to have a second, and even more important moment in history. The early version sounds positively conventional compared to the version that appeared later that same year when Sacrifice was re-recorded for Bathory’s seminal self-titled debut album. By that point the band were delivering all their music with grim, frostbitten harshness that was like nothing before it. The black metal sound was born.