Reviewed – 02/01/06

In the Flame of Glory
[Stellar Winter Records]

Oh, so much hate! So much self-pride mixed with hatred for others! So much Hitler praising! That's right, the Russian (Hey wait... didn't Hitler kill twenty five million Russians?) band Forest is completely a NSBM band to the extreme. So if that bothers you, you might as well stop reading this review right now. I got the band's newest C.D. "In The Flame Of Glory" because I found out one of the band members also plays in Temnozor, one of the best Folk Black Metal bands I've heard in some time. Though the two bands share a musician, their music couldn't be any more different!

"In The Flame Of Glory" is at best average low-fi raw Black Metal. There's nothing here really that I haven't heard a million times before from a myriad of band's in the early 90's. The guitar melodies are strummed so fast that they become a blur of noise, but they aren't that bad as somehow the repetitiveness gets a bit hypnotizing after a while. The drums are odd... they're played well, that's for sure. Sometimes I really like them and other times they're weak and sloppy sounding. The cymbals now and then have this weird warping sound to them that gets on my nerves a bit too. But honestly, this tendency to get sloppy when band's play at higher speeds seems almost to be the norm with these early 90's styled Black Metal bands. The Absurd cover they do is just atrocious! I know they covered that one because "Forest" is in the song title, but they should have kept it right off the album. There's a few synth parts on "In The Flame Of Glory", but they're used sparingly and only as atmosphere.

The lyrics as I stated above are about White Supremacy and White Pride, but some of the lyrics also touch base with Norse mythology and war. The vocalist has a vocal style that is a raw Blackened vocal style mixed with a typical White Supremacist/Skinhead Rock/Metal delivery. I never cared much at all for the vocals on most of those skinhead albums, and I still don't care for them even when they are mixed with Black Metal vocals like they are here.

Surprisingly, the production is pretty decent and doesn't totally suck ass! The album doesn't have the best production by any means and is still quite tinny sounding, but it's a lot better than I thought it would be. I would have given this C.D. a 4.5/10 if it hadn't had been for the decent production.

The cover art for the album is well done, but it may offend some people. But hey, if you're going to be offended by this band, you'd have stopped reading long ago, right? The cover shows SS Soldiers in the midst of battle, a longboat full of Viking warriors, and a fiery Swastika emblazoned across the sky. Inside of the lyric booklet they've included all of the lyrics in Russian as well as English translations of each song, which is a cool bonus. Each page of the booklet shows some little piece of the cover art, and on the last page there's a painting of Adolf. The twenty page booklet also has a two page tribute to Forest guitarist Ulv who was murdered in October of 2005, apparently by another person in the NSBM scene. I also read he predicted his own death a week before it happened and he died by his own knife that he had just sharpened himself. It also seems he may have had someone kill him, or some such shit. I don't know. He's dead anyway it seems. I guess if you're going to be in such an area of employment, you can expect this might happen to you at some point in your career.

Fans of extreme raw Black Metal will find something to enjoy on "In The Flame Of Glory". I myself neither loved it or hated it and found it to be simply "okay". If you're one that only likes to buy Metal albums that try to be innovative and unique, your best bet would be to stray away from this release.