Review Summary: Black metal of the worst kind. A release with every chance of redemption ruined by over indulgence of everything kvlt with little substance to provide authenticity.
There is something surreal about the character of raw ambient black metal that makes it so appealing, whether it is the bleak atmospheres it creates, the swirling rhythms and melodies of the music itself or the distant ghost like screams of the vocalists there is a real possibility of being taken to another world by the skill that some masters of the genre have to offer. Paysage D'hiver, Older Burzum, Alrakis, Vinterriket and Weakling are just some of the many examples that encompass the brilliance of such music.
But with every style of music, there is no denying the amounts of unpassionate, unskilled or just uninteresting muck that clogs up a genre. In the Genre of ambient and atmospheric Black metal Myrimin is a perfect example of horrid execution of a style.
If you search Myrimin on google you won't find much, save for a link to this very site, Rateyourmusic, and a youtube link to the album 'Bolota Ohta'. Upon opening the youtube link you may think that an album with such obscure linguistic offering, a quite fitting album cover and being Icelandic that you might be uncovering a hidden Gem but you'd struggle to be further from the truth. 'Bolota Ohta' Opens with some of the most offensively bad production to be done to an album and this is the worst offender of the album, it's unprofessional, inconsistent and downright jarring - The only saving grace of this album is the ambient sections that do offer some quality but is still not worth investing the time to reach. To actually listen to this album with have you sit through:
- 'riffs' that fail to even grab the attention of listener even once.
- sudden cuts and unnatural transitions to ambient sections and other riffs.
- strings that sound like a 10 year old noodling around with a guitar for the first time
- horribly amateur throaty black metal vocals
- Drums that sound like someone hitting a pillow with a stick and have no real variety (cymbals) are used once in the album is arguably the best part, 13:25 into the album stream)
If 'Bolota Ohta' had been produced better or did the 'poor production' gimmick well the album may have been passable as an entry into the genre but as it stands the album symbolizes everything that you can do wrong to a black metal album. If you sit down in a dark room with half-decent headphone and listen to Burzum or Paysage d'hiver, you can perfectly differentiate between instruments and vocals while being graced with a blanket of pleasurable fuzz to reward your listening.
If you listen to 'Bolota Ohta' in a dark room with even top quality headphones, all you'll get is a headache.
