These little monsters grow fast. For healthy growth, they need healthy food. The two spirits/monsters of Eihwar feed on the best there is: the bodies and souls of their human hosts, whom they possess, but also the love they received immediately upon their almost simultaneous appearance on YouTube and small stages. The scenes also grew very quickly, and their first album, Viking War Trance, was released just a year and a half ago. Driven by their uncontrollable urge to dance, Eihwar is already back (the term is poorly chosen, as they never went very far) with Hugrheim. Words like that, somewhere between gurgling and reading the Ikea catalogue, are going to be everywhere: that's what Vikings do, the real ones, the bearded ones, the ones you see in God of War and the Vikings series. 100% true, 100% beard, 100% runes, 100% hard muscles, 100% øtentïk.
No doubt, the Vikings are going to shake their booty like they did at the best raves of the 8th century! We wiggle our hips and wiggle our runic bumbum. As usual with Eihwar, there's this totally confident and enjoyable approach of taking huge clichés and turning them into krisprolls by grinding them through the electro-pagan mill. It's a playful and uninhibited attitude that doesn't prevent them from taking their fun seriously: Eihwar isn't here to mock us, as long as the reverse is also true! Of course, with this excess, these costumes straight out of a comic book, this Nordic mishmash and this pure and simple desire to mix pagan/Viking aesthetics and dancefloor boom-boom, Eihwar will annoy and make purists snigger, those with furrowed brows who take their Drakkar to their 9 to 5 job and do their shopping. The lightness of the music does not prevent respect, and although the work may be done with pleasure and amusement, it is also done with real skill and without cynicism.
So let's put our legendary seriousness aside for a moment to enjoy this new party, whose opening moments are irresistible: foghorns, martial percussion, Mark's guttural voice, Asrunn's whispers... Nauðiz grabs us with its energy, and this enthusiasm also gives rise to a kind of poetry, nuances that give the tracks their depth and soul. A blend of traditional and electronic sounds, Eihwar's music can be appreciated like a play, a succession of stories recounting how our two monster spirits live their new incarnation, haunted by memories of Hugrheim, the spirit world. Eihwar shakes our bodies but also tickles our imagination, conjuring up images and timeless worlds (the more melancholic reveries of Ljósgarðr, for example).
We appreciate the more prominent presence of Mark's voice and his darker, more aggressive growls. With his funny helmet, we'd like to rename him Däꞧthvädëꞧꞩøn. Listen to him chanting on Ein, for example, bringing his roughness to the track. We also applaud the sound design care, the textures of the sounds, especially the percussion: Eihwar immerses the listener with a few organic touches and more atmospheric interludes that add variety (the very well done instrumental Skuggaríki, with its cinematic feel, the twilight and mysterious conclusion The Lake of the Dead, and the acoustic version of Berserkr at the end of the album are all judicious sidesteps). Hugrheim is therefore the ideal blockbuster sequel: it contains all the ingredients of the previous album, but everything has been amplified: it is more ambitious, more nuanced, richer. Was Eihwar annoying you? You'll be consumed by your own rage. Were you already dancing? Then get ready to wreak havoc in Valhalla.
