Album Of The Week: Primordial Where Greater Men Have Fallen

Underground metal doesn't soar very often anymore. It churns and wriggles and spits and seethes, and it can be really great at all these things. If you're in a bleak, heavy mood, something like Watain can line up perfectly with your mood. When you're actively pissed off, it can be great, too; thanks to recent albums from Nux Vomica and At The Gates, I've found myself enjoying the feeling lately. But very little of this music feels triumphant. If you're going to stand on the edge of a cliff and spread your arms wide, breathe the wind in through your nose, and feel like you can swallow the world, you're probably not going to have, like, Pig Destroyer on your headphones. It would fuck the whole moment up. Things didn't used to be that way. Black Sabbath and Danzig and Entombed made dark and heavy and uncompromising music, but if you heard them at the right moment, you could feel like you were 40 feet tall. And that's what I hear in Where Greater Men Have Fallen, the new album from the Irish band Primordial. The album does all the things that underground metal is supposed to do in 2014. It blasts and roars and shuts the outside world out. But it does all that with a sense of melody and uplift that I haven't heard in a long time.