Recently, the Bay Area has been the site of some KILLER black metal bands. Weakling, Leviathan and Ludicra. Now behold the might of Draugar! Draugar are (according to The Eyrbyggia Saga, from circa: 13th century Iceland) "the walking dead who inhabit treasure-filled buiral mounds and often smell like rotting meat." Sounds pretty fucking metal to me! The vocals on a few parts sound like Wrest of Leviathan doing the vocals but actually this is a different guy, named Hildolf. There’s a VERY dark aspect to this - which is not just because it’s just a “black metal” album rather it’s overall sound & presentation. This has been compared to Burzum but really Hildolf knows how to properly make a severely bleak atmosphere and play guitar and sound truly grim - which is something Varg has never quite accomplished.

(((1))) Twisted space-rock crossed with extremely bleak & mid-tempo blackness.
((((2)))) Grim & bleak but at mid-tempo with a raw but nicely programmed drum machine, cool guitar strums, some strange military-like whistles. The crux of this is distorted vocals, repetitive guitar strums (sounding like Bathory’s “One Rode To Asa Bay”) some droning atomsphere then slow creepy stuff which later (3:58) becomes freakish fast, noisy & tormented black metal then goes back to the basic strumming & teeth gnashing.
((((3)))) Fucking awesome noisy atmosphere infested blackness! Sounds somewhat like industrial-noise, too. Something like old Darkthrone crossed with Merzbow. Wonderfully epic & eerie stuff!
((((4)))) Just amazing echoed guitar strumming & an truly grim voice telling you “yourr-rrr paaaathh issszzss weeeak!”. Trippy blackened “otherworldly-ness” that marches slowly within your nightmares.
(((5))) Fast pummelling & hypnotic drudgery of total grimness. The occasional slow parts are amusing just to hear him go from slow strumming to setting the drum machine on overkill.
(((6))) Spacey & very hypnotic. Let your mind go into the bleakness!
(((7))) As if you didn’t get enough bleakness on the previous track - this will do you in! Repetitive mid-tempo ‘traditional’ BM scales played
(((8))) More bleakness with various levels of noisy & strange melodic keyboard patterns. This mix is severly fucked up but in a good way.
((((9)))) The opening notes of this are just sooooo evil it’s not even funny! Torturted shrieks & simple piano chords plus drony guitars. It’s all you need to know.