Amon Amarth

With Oden On Our Side

[4/5] Amon Amarth’s imagery may document gore-strewn battlefields, but their guitar harmonies resonate triumphantly above the carnage. The Swedish group’s lyrics reveal the key to their melodic buoyancy: Either they’re celebrating a Viking crew’s brutal victory or they’re voicing a dying narrator’s dreams of impending paradise. Their guitar leads slice as sharply as the axes and swords their warriors wield, and Fredrik Andersson sets the marching pace, as unrelenting as a military drummer on the frontlines. Singer Johan Hegg alternates between a throaty bellow (particularly commanding when he’s intoning “Fire!” or “Attack!”) and a scratchy black-metal delivery (usually during the choruses). The album’s final track, “Prediction Of Warfare,” conjures all the instrumental grandeur of a prog-rock epic without sacrificing its sense of life-and-death urgency. Amon Amarth vanquish their peers as mercilessly as their protagonists seize sleeping villages, and their clarion dual-guitar tones give the group an atmospheric appeal that transcends the die-hard horned-helmet set. (METAL BLADE; metalblade.com) Andrew Miller