![]() It’s not that anyone’s now hoping for Amon Amarth to be metal’s great hybridizers or innovators. Candlemass’ Messiah Marcolin guests on “Hel”, but Amon Amarth is so unyielding that the best they can do is let him moan in the background like Marianne Faithful. They push ahead with the same up-tempo roil so much that any break at all- be they the sampled sounds of murder at the start of the gruesome “Blood Eagle” or the psychedelic guitar spirals that introduce closer “Warriors of the North”- are welcome, overdue diversions. The band behind Hegg seems exhausted or, at the very least, over it. In fact, reading Deceiver of the Gods is arguably more engaging than listening to most of it. His account of a brutal murder technique called Blood Eagle makes for fine pulp fiction, while “Shape Shifter” uses the life of the god Loke to discuss betrayal and a necessary balance of light and dark. In fact, Hegg is compelling throughout most of Deceiver of the Gods, and he’s got good material to offer. Frontman Johan Hegg sounds convincing here, too, delivering the tale of Ragnarök’s end less like a storyteller than a witness. Amon Amarth at least displays some vivacity there, volleying a riff between drums blasts like a game of pinball. The symptoms start as early as the opening title track, a thrashing sprint that flatlines in the chorus and rebounds a bit in a chant-along bridge but ultimately stumbles into a solo so tepid and predictable that it nearly necessitates skipping right along to the next track, “As Loke Falls”. In the past, they’ve sounded strangely uplifting this time around, they simply sound persistent. But the new Deceiver of the Gods feels formulaic and tired, as if the long-running quintet has now settled into the complacency and comfort of their reputation- bad news, of course, for warriors who end songs with shouts of “Now we attack! Ride into fate!” At last, Amon Amarth has made a record that is every bit as rote, uninspired and matter-of-fact as a set of Cliff’s Notes. After an incredible streak of righteous albums, 2011’s Surtur Rising sometimes felt overly stiff and deliberate, as if Amon Amarth were trying to bully past the limits of their own Viking brand. ![]() Of late, though, Amon Amarth has started to run out of, if not songs, then novel ways to make their stories really stick within those songs. ![]() And there’s always the option of fan-fiction, or creating imagined sagas of pugnacity and defeat from the lore itself. There’s little reason to suspect, then, that Amon Amarth will soon run out of stories to sing their potential pool of subjects is, in essence, a culture’s complete heritage, and they’ve got tales of Oden and Loke to share yet. They are a sort of turbocharged Cliff’s Notes to The Poetic Edda and The Prose Edda, a modern metal band revivifying ancient history with unwavering conviction. Indeed, to see Amon Amarth live is to see almost all of an audience throw hands or horns at once, chanting along to stories of wins in war and glory in the afterlife. The best of those records (by mere example, see with Oden on Our Side and Versus the World) have felt both urgent and addictive, combining death metal heft and modern rock-ready hooks to build and brandish verifiable anthems. During the last two decades, they’ve released nine albums of headstrong Viking metal, built almost entirely around tales of shared Scandinavian heritage and tunes that either charged like a massive military’s frontline or sailed skyward like a hard-earned victory chant. For a band so clearly invested in tales of invasion, war, and conquest, Sweden’s Amon Amarth is a strangely lead-footed target, so listless and uninterested in change that they’d make for an easy capture on a Norse battlefield of old.
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