Artist: PRIMORDIAL
Album: REDEMPTION AT THE PURITANS HAND (2LP)

Release date: 2011
Media type: LP

Celtic, black metallers, Primordial return (Thank God for that) with their seventh album, Redemption at the Puritan's Hand. After the acclaim and brilliance of their last two records, 2005’s The Gathering Wilderness and 2007’s To The Nameless Dead, the band has a lot to live up to. Like those two album's, Primordial has continued into the darker realms of its sound on this record. The record's opening track, "No Grave Deep Enough" sends chill just upon reading the title. As the song begins one can almost picture a soldier riding a pale horse across an open battlefield strewn with dead and dying men. Perhaps that soldier's name is Death. A topic that vocalist Alan Averill "Nemtheanga" states is at the heart of Redemption...

FROM PRIMORDIAL’S ALAN A NEMTHEANGA:
"If I had to sum this album up I would say this is the 'death' album, plain and simple. There isn't exactly a whole concept but many of the themes deal with mortality, how we deal with it. The spiritual structures we place around us to make sense of it. Sex, death, procreation and god. As we get older our relationship to our lives changes, the realization you will not live forever, the grand plan you hoped to uncover never materializes, food for worms and nothing more. We are animals, beasts and making peace with that beast might be your life's work but more often than not he is never tamed.

Once a wolf always a wolf...

We all seek redemption in one way or another, from lies or from truth. Those of us who are godless or faithless often envy the man of faith for his life seems to have an extra purpose, despite the fact that logic, pragmatism, science and realism should crush any sign of faith we still persist in lying to ourselves. Perhaps the alternative is too much to bear. So the themes of religion, mortality and death occur over and over again, along with continuing themes of alienation, martyrdom, sacrifice, violence and retribution. Occasionally, very occasionally, a chink of light breaks through.

TRACKLIST:

1. No Grave Deep Enough
2. Lain With The Wolf
3. Bloodied Yet Unbowed
4. God's Old Snake
5. The Mouth Of Judas
6. The Black Hundred
7. The Puritan's Hand
8. Death Of The Gods