Utlagr - 1066 - Blood and Iron in Hastings (2007)

Hailing from Québec City, Québec is Utlagr, a five piece melodic black metal band. Although I've seen them use the term Vinlandic Pagan Metal, which sounds cooler and the title, '1066 - Blood And Iron In Hastings,' is from the historical Battle of Hastings where the Normans conquered the English. Of course who can overlook the viking warrior on the cover either. So, perhaps entering them into the viking metal genre is possible too.

Regardless of genre classification the guitar work is mostly mid-paced, slightly epic in character and never becomes overly frantic and crazy like a brutal black metal band, and fortunately there are plenty of interesting riffs to be found in this album, yet not a solo to be heard. The drums on the other hand tend to be a bit more brutal, but diverse enough so they don’t become overpowering, while vocally the words are screamed out in a fairly normal black metal tone. Lyrically speaking four of the songs have words wrote in French while the other six have English with lyrics detailing on the bands outlook on society, Norse mythology and hatred directed at Christianity, though the lyrics are well wrote and not immature at all.

While, ‘1066 - Blood and Iron in Hastings’ has some memorable parts to it with some great guitar work, what it lacks is diversity as things just sound kind of unchanged from track to track. Still curiously there is such a hard driven spirit behind the music that I still find the whole thing to be quite engaging. Just as the albums title is based around a battle, Utlagr triumphantly pounds away for nearly fifty minutes of glorious devastating black/viking metal carnage. Of course I'll still say if the band added some acoustic guitars, synth or the aforementioned guitar solos it would have benefited their music tremendously.

In 2010 the band released a 7" EP titled, 'L'éveil de Jormungandr,' which ultimately proved to be the bands final creation as guitarist, Jacques Villiard died of complications related to cancer and the band split up. Unfortunate they lost a talented guitarist and friend and never managed to record a second album and it would have been interesting to see what they would have come up with.