Ámr

After blowing up Emperor in 2001, guitarist, keyboardist, and composer Ihsahn embarked on a solo career that has been strangely dazzling in its focused creativity, expansive scope, and a relentless willingness to throw caution out the window. While his first five solo offerings retained their tangential connection to second wave black metal, all the while pushing its more progressive and vanguard elements, the evolution shifted jarringly with 2016's Arktis. Guitar tones were more overdriven than jagged, analog synths became as dominant as orchestration, and songs were written consciously with melodic, even poppy, hooks and dense but pronounced rhythms, atmospherics, and dynamics.
Ámr, album number seven, marks the first time in Ihsahn's career the he made an album as a conscious extension of its predecessor. This doesn’t mean that it sounds the same, not by any stretch, but it is a refinement of the process that created Arktis. With the notable exception of a lone guitar solo by Fredrik Åkesson of Opeth on " Arcana Imperii," Ihsahn's only accompanist is drummer Tobias Ornes Andersen. The production here is less symphonic in arrangement, this is far more stark and immediate. Ihsahn allows each instrument and vocal layer a separate space here, creating a more open if no less foreboding vibe. Opener "Lend Me the Eyes of Millenia" is a conscious nod to his black metal past, but with a profound twist. The dirty vocals let the listener know immediately that this is Ihsahn with its snarling blastbeats and modal structure, but the Roland 808 synth lines claim the foreground instead of tremolo picking. It's merely the way in, however. The popping, swinging drums and rattling guitar riffing that commence "Arcana Imperii" comes right out of '80s hard rock, while swirling keyboards are framed quite separately around lush vocal harmonies and a proggy pop hook, with Akesson's guitar break simultaneously adding tension and release. Elsewhere, as on "Samr" and the gloomy "Where You Are Lost and I Belong," composer John Carpenter's creepy synth scores to his films -- particularly the original Halloween -- influence the spacious, near-Gothic, funereal, instrumental approach and subdued anguished singing at once menacing and vulnerable. The skeletal synth intro to "Twin Black Angels" recalls the original John Foxx incarnation of Ultravox, as electric guitar and skittering snares frame a lush, loss-filled balladic melody that gives way to a rocker in bridge and refrain where dirty vocals are interspersed with clean ones around a soaring guitar break. Despite, or perhaps because of, the '80s references, only Ihsahn could have combined all of these individual elements and made them gel with his imprimatur style. Closer "Wake" adds the tremolo picking back in alongside wobbly careening synths, filthy vocals, and blastbeats though the chorus is in clean, almost bright four-part vocal harmony before the instrumental bridge traverses the threshold of the anthemic. If Ihsahn attempted to make an accessible, catchy, mainstream metal album with Arktis, Ámr is the sound of him perfecting that vision, and as a result, comprises one of his finest outings. ~ Thom Jurek