Album Rating: 4.0

This album is great fun.

Classic album

hard jammers? more like jam harder posers

Album Rating: 5.0

listening to their discog again. O what glory.

Album Rating: 5.0

one of those albums that never get old

yeah its cheesy but in the best way possible

every time i jam this i wanna watch conan with arnie

Album Rating: 5.0

-Conan! What is best in life?

-Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. And hear the triumphant keyboards of Bal-Sagoth.

Album Rating: 4.5

Cacophonous just released a remastered version of this so it's FINALLY on Spotify and I just jammed the everloving shizz out of this record. Took me back to high school, I had an original first pressing of this back then and used to spin it all the time...classic album and Bal-Sagoth's best hands down. This album is one of the essential albums of second-wave, keyboard inclusive Black Metal from the 90's and sits comfortably alongside other eternal gems such as "Anthems to the Welkin...", "Dusk and Her Embrace", "Nemesis Divina", "Nord" and others.

Album Rating: 5.0

"one of the essential albums of second-wave, keyboard inclusive Black Metal"



haha, eaxactly! I'm not sure whether Bal-Sagoth should be classified as BM, their songs are more or less classical arrangements with extreme metal instrumentation and both black and death metal riffs. Ergo I'd describe them simply as symphonic metal. Probably they're too far off from any genre to be correctly labeled though.



I hear a lot of Holst, Smetana, Poledouris and other classical composers in their work, which make them sound rather majestic and uplifting than menacing or devilish.

Album Rating: 4.5

^^^ It's a testament to the brilliance of this band that you can't really peg them into one singular genre. I consider them black metal only because I discovered this album in the mid 90's around the same time I was discovering Dusk and Her Embrace, Stormblast, The Pagan Prosperity by Old Man's Child, Anthems to the Welkin, etc. etc. I remember being in 8th grade in 1996 and sending a $20 bill I had from my allowance in an envelope, wrapped up in black construction paper, to Europe to order the CD and just hoping it actually came. Obviously it did, and on the original pressing the first "track" was actually an .exe file that had samples from Gehenna, Sigh and some other Cacophonous artists that just played automatically if you put it in a computer. At the time, that was the coolest thing I had ever experienced. The sense of discovery back then as I learned of more and more second wave BM bands (along with the increasing development of the internet) was possibly the most exciting and fulfilling period I will have in my life...I don't classify Bal Sagoth as death metal because, as an American who grew up in the 80's and 90's, I was familiar with all the extreme thrash bands and American death metal bands by the time I was in 3rd grade. I actually discovered Type O Negative's "October Rust" before I discovered Cradle of Filth and, subsequently, Black Metal. That is because in the mid 90's the internet was still new and a lot of Americans simply didn't know about it. So, while in Europe, Bal-Sagoth might be classified as death metal, to me as an American they were so completely original I simply had to classify them around the bands I was discovering around the same time, which was mostly keyboard heavy Second Wave Black Metal. Either way, that was a long, ranting way to say this album is a fucking classic and essential to anyone who loves well written and structured metal that gives no fucks to genre restrictions.

u rule dude

Album Rating: 5.0

I own the same CD with that bloody .exe file.

From all the albums you mentioned I only dig Anthems. I could never get into CoF, probably because I heard Bal-Sagoth first.

Album Rating: 4.0

I love how a metal band can be so ambitious and grandiose about their music and then you can see them next week at some slummy live venue filled with drunk punks and nerds.

lol I just started listening to them again recently too and now I see the threads, dope

also the more I listen to them the harder I find it to pin them as black metal except for the earlier stuff. they still have the elements going forward but a couple albums are not very black metally, which isn't a bad thing of course

Album Rating: 5.0

What I find most brilliant about them is the perfect interplay between the keys and the rhythm guitar. The rhythm guitar doesn't just stupididly follow the melody but has a life of its own and thus the songs get way more entertaining and complex.

Album Rating: 4.5

Hahaha, Jesus I was shit housed when I made that last post.



True, they really do defy a singular genre descriptor, as there are elements from many different forms of extreme metal. Another reason I tend to default to labeling them Black Metal, though, is because I swear I read an interview somewhere once where Lord Byron pretty adamantly insisted they were a black metal band. Can't remember when or where, though.



I agree about the guitars and keys, Alastor. I think that perfect interplay may be in no small part due to the fact that, if I'm not mistaken, the guitarist and keyboardist are brothers. I know from my own personal experience playing in bands with my brother over the years, there is an innate connection there that can't really be duplicated writing music with anyone else.

Album Rating: 4.0

That's too much spacing. You will learn the strange posting mechanisms in time. Everyone here is drunk or high afaik.

Having grown in the '90s, I can relate to a lot of the above. Haven't really checked these guys though. Are they any similar to Haggard?

Album Rating: 4.0

I could only stand 30 seconds of Haggard, so I would ignorantly say this is way better.

Album Rating: 5.0

@manosg: Not really, but I could see a Haggard fan enjoying Bal-Sagoth. Both take inspiration from classical music, but whilst Haggard have a rather dark atmospheric/medieval vibe, B-S indulge in triumphant arangements similiar to orchestral suites by modern day composers. They both have narrative, spoken word passages though.