Let me tell y’all something right off the bat: I was excited as all hell when I saw Skraeckoedlan‘s name pop up in our promo queue earlier this year. You see, wayyyyy back in the nascent days of this blog — the Swedish quartet dropped an album called Sagor, for which Corey and I promptly fell head over heels. It was a positively rifftastic journey — one that I decided, then and there, had earned the band at the very least a courtesy listen to any and all future releases.

I called dibs on their new full-length, Vermillion Sky, the minute I saw it come through our inbox. And then… well, at least initially, I didn’t love it! Now, I’ve since come around on the album considerably — It’s actually pretty great! Who knew first impressions aren’t always the best ones? — but not without a pretty fundamental reevaluation of my own critical process. Am I going to explain? You’re goddamned right, I am. Let’s jump in.

Even though this review is, ostensibly, about how I came around to liking Vermillion Sky, I need to start by talking about why I liked its grandfather-album, Sagor. When that album came out, this blog was scarcely more than a year old. I was young. I was living in a big city, and I had more energy than I can even fathom having in this day and age. And Sagor felt like a perfect album for that time period. It was loose! It was fun! It hooked you in instantly, and it had riffs for freaking days. Songs like “Gigantos” and “El Monstro” felt almost illegally catchy, to the extent that I still occasionally find myself humming almost a decade later.

And listening to Vermillion Sky… is a very different experience! It’s moodier. It’s more contemplative. It still riffs pretty hard, but it’s nowhere near as immediate as I remember Sagor being.* The opening two tracks here — “Cosmic Dawn” and “Starsquatch” — just hit differently; the former is an echo-laden instrumental that feels like it’s pondering floating through space, while the latter drops a dose of reality on the listener, reminding us how heavy, isolating and emotionally taxing such a trip would be. If you come into Vermillion Sky expecting “loose!” or “fun!” right out of the gate, well… you might have a bit of trouble with these two. I did, too, at first!

* It’s worth noting here: the band did put out an album in between these two — 2019’s Eorþe — but I’ll be honest, I’d completely missed out on it until starting the review process for this album. So much for my “courtesy listen to everything they do” proclamation.

Have you ever experienced that phenomenon where an album’s first few tracks are so good, you end up just listening to them over and over again, indefinitely delaying moving onto its other songs? (Consider, say… “Aces High” and “2 Minutes to Midnight” on Powerslave, or… “Trust” and “Omega Days” from Moon Tooth’s Crux. Absolute kings of the 1-2 punch.) Okay! Well! This, at first, felt like the exact opposite of that to me. I tried so hard to find an entry point into “Cosmic Dawn” and “Starsquatch” that I ended up getting frustrated and not moving on past them.

But ultimately, that was a me problem, not a Skraeckoedlan problem — both because I didn’t allow myself to venture into the (pretty freaking great) rest of the album, but also because my entire critical process was flawed.

I realized later than I should have that I was judging Vermillion Sky for what it wasn’t, rather than as its own unique beast. I came in thinking the band would be giving us Sagor II — again, sorry Eorþe! You’re good, too, I swear! — and then, when it wasn’t that, I started to lose interest.

And that… kinda sucks! That’s not fair to the band or the album. It completely ignores the possibility that… gasp… the band members aren’t the same people they were in 2015? That they’ve had experiences in the near-decade since then that might have shaped the music they make? I know I’m sure as hell not the same person I was in 2015, and the world at large sure as shit isn’t as “loose” or as “fun” as it was in 2015, so… why should the band be subject to such restrictions?

Basically, I realized I was being a regressive moron. So I bucked up and listened through Vermillion Sky in full. And, wouldn’t you know it: there’s a lot to like here!

Take “Mysteria,” for example. It’s a nimble headbanger with tasty, often-harmonized guitar licks that recall the earlier days of bands like Baroness or Kylesa. The band also juxtaposes those riffs against a more psychedelic, meditative mid-section to give you a “best of both worlds” approach between older and newer Skraeckoedlan. All told, between “Mysteria” and later-album cuts like “Meteorb” or the ridiculously catchy “Night Satan,” there’s plenty of stupendous riffage to go around. The twin guitar tandem of Robert Lamu and Henrik Grüttner proves as strong as it’s ever been.

Lamu, of course, also doubles as the band’s vocalist, and turns in stellar performance after stellar performance throughout Vermillion Sky. The dude jumps effortlessly between melodic cleans (“Night Satan”) and deeper, more gutteral howls, (“Metagalactic Void Honcho”) with one particular constant: there’s an underlying sense of pain throughout. You can hear the ache in his voice — no, you can really feel the ache — regardless of which particular cadence he’s exploring at the time. It’s absolutely tremendous work.

The back half of the album has its share of “epics,” but each hits a bit differently than the last. The title track, for example, comes off as a bit of a pummeler, with gargantuan riffs and a persistent, upbeat tempo. But then, its immediate successor, “Metagalactic Void Honcho,” slows things down to a near-dirge-like pace; thankfully, the slow, gradual build of its ascending lead line proves compelling as fuck, and allows the song to keep your interest throughout. Later still, “Astronautilus” leans back into the ambience and the harmonized guitar leads and delivers a closer that hits you right in the “exploratory, mid-period Mastodon” feels.

So, in short: to hell with first impressions. There’s a ton to like about Vermillion Sky, and Skraeckoedlan should be commended for it. Give the album the time it needs, let it breathe, and you’ll be in for a real treat in the end.

Keep it heavy,
—Dan

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Vermillion Sky is available now via Fuzzorama Records. For more information on Skraeckoedlan, visit the band’s official website.