Ancestors Blood "Return of the Ancient Ones" LP vinyl

Limited to 300 handnumbered copies with 12" inlay on thick paper.

Formed in winter 2002 in Finland, to express their tribute to heathen beliefs and commemorate ancient times with magic and rituals. This debut showed Ancestors Blood with all their trademark elements as they appeared on their demos, yet more mature and executed in the most professional ways. During the 50 minutes playingtime, you'll find a superb mix of storming and energetic aggression and bombastic atmospheres, with long traditional intros and outros.
This is not simply a pagan black metal album; it's a highly atmospheric and diverse esoteric heathen black metal album, sometimes reminding of Dimmu Borgir's "Stormblast" and Osculum Infame's first album, yet should also appeal to fans of Summoning for it's epic and bombastic sounds. Originally released in 2007, it's been out of print and unavailable for a couple of years now, so we repressed a few copies. Get it now if you haven't already.

And so it was time for first the Ancestors Blood full-length. The most notable differences to the demos lie in the production and the vocals. First of all, the production is overall cleaner and heavier than on the demos. This is good, as it gives the music more power and I also don’t think lo-fi sounds would suit this band. Secondly, the synths (a very important part of Ancestors Blood’s sound) are often very low in the mix, while the guitars are very upfront. It seems like after the synth dominated “Forgotten Times” demo the band decided to make the guitars more prominent but sadly it seems to have happened at the cost of the synths. I myself like the way this band uses synth, so having them in the background like this decreases the atmospheric element to some extent. The synths should’ve been a bit louder overall.
The third major difference to the demos lies in the vocal department. On this album Raud uses a very extreme shrieky/howling vocal style which can be described as mixture of Varg Vikernes and Leinad of the Polish BM band Legion. I enjoy these vocals, as they sound more maniacal and better than the pretty standard BM vocals of the demos.
Songwise there’s not much that new to talk about, as about half of the material are re-recordings of demo tracks. This makes the album carry a bit of a “best of” stigma, yet I won’t complain too much as e.g. “Wisdom Opens the Gate for the King” sounds better than its demo version and not only due to the heavier sound. On this version of the track Raud uses both shrieky and clean vocals to good effect. The orginial version of this track, which can be found on the first demo, had only clean vocals.
Other than that we have all the familiar Ancestors Blood elements present, such as the obligatory (but good) synth piece as an intro, the for the most part slow to mid-tempo pace of the music and the good flow of the songs. The album picks up the pace during its latter part though, since the new track “Fatherland” is the fastest and most aggressive song from these guys so far (no blast beats though). The track in question also benefits from Raud’s new vocal style, he sounds even more maniacal due to the increased tempo. Also another new track, “Reign of Terror”, contains some fast parts, so perhaps the band has decided to become a bit faster in the future.
On tracks like “Annihilation of Christianity” and “Shades of Life” one clearly notices how down in the mix the synths are, especially if one is used to the demo versions. The synths are almost completely drowned out by the guitars. Fortunately both aforementioned tracks also contain parts without the guitars where the synths can be heard well. Overall a good and enjoyable debut album from this Finnish horde, especially the new style of the vocals was a nice surprise. Pick this up when you’re in the mood for atmospheric black metal that isn’t hyper fast, yet has really extreme vocals.

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