Not music - ambient soundtrack noise would be generous
Heilung is a curiosity, to be sure. I can appreciate its experimental and, at times, sense of hypnosis. It might suffice as ambient background noise, or used piecemeal in a soundtrack.
On its own merits though, and treating this as though it is intended to be music, the album barely holds up for the first 2 tracks before completely falling apart and never coming back. Surely, track 2 Krigsgaldr is the closest you'll find to a traditional song here, and it would be very cool if about 1/3rd of the length. The interesting content could all come and go in about 3.5 minutes, but stretching this idea out to 9 minutes is simply boredom-inducing.
The chants, whispers, and strange screams that come and go, along with the same boring mid-pace drum hits that pop in now and again, plague the rest of the album, when there's music. Tracks 3 and 4 are very powerful in how truly annoying they are and being back-to-back. It's a brutal 1-2 punch of "holy crap, how bad is the rest of this album going to be?".
While they ease up a bit on the annoying elements, they fall prey to their own pretentiousness and self-indulgence with the last 3 tracks taking well over a half hour despite having no real content.
If you absolutely adore track 2, maybe you'll find more to like here than me. But at it stands, this is barely serviceable as background noise from a musical perspective. It's more like a piece of art you would look at for 2 minutes, think "that's strange and interesting", and move on. Unfortunately, this piece of art wants to assault your ears for nearly 70 more minutes than that.
|