Frostnatt - How can black metal be a sound of the Urals?

Frostnatt

Den russiske frosten

April 7th, 2023

I enjoyed the 2022 EP Dette stedet kjenner bare kulden (“This Place Only Knows the Cold”) of instrumental melodic black metal by Frostnatt, a solo entity by one Alex Evenson in Yekaterinburg, Russia. This new 2023 album Den russiske frosten (“The Russian Frost”; all Frostnatt songs have titles in Norwegian) is eight tracks emphasizing melody, mostly played at an uptempo speed for headbanging or physical movement (sometimes launching into all-out black metal blasting frenzy), although one can just as easily focus on the melodies for a type of meditation through tremolo-guitar black metal music. Here’s the thing: Frostnatt seeks to convey the imagined interpretation of the Ural region (the city of Yekaterinburg is located about 880 miles to the east of Moscow [a distance comparable from Seattle to Bakersfield, California] {some 100 miles from Los Angeles}). Yekaterinburg is on the Iset River between the Volga-Ural region and Siberia, in the Ural Federal District. Generally, the region is seen as a type of border between what is considered Europe and Asia. Put it this way, the Ural Federal District, which is an enormously huge territory of some 700,000 square miles, is not considered cosmopolitan, to say the least, even though Yekaterinburg itself is the fourth largest city in Russia. The Ural Federal District is bigger than Alaska; by comparison, Alaska is some 663,000 square miles, and Alaska is 3.7 times bigger than California; Alaska is more than twice the size of Texas; Alaska is bigger than California, Texas and Montana combined. Thus, how could black metal be as a sound of the Ural region, of the landscape and especially of the winter, a vast land of frozen forests and mountains? This album right here is the answer provided by Frostnatt. I would say that this music depends on the melodies to make its mark. It's really the guitar melodies that are the central attraction for the audiences interested in uptempo melodic black metal. Come away with Frostnatt to a land of ice and snow.

Den Russiske Frosten by Frostnatt

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