With ÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞ (the Rune Þ being a Germanic symbol for giants (Thursen)) Swedish Black Metal band ARACKANUM, who’ve been around since the early nineties, present their new album relatively soon after the 2008 released Antikosmos. Their homepage tells me that ÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞ is supposed to be a "Soundtrack To Wintry Death Of The Worlds". Excited I put on my headphones and start the journey into the strange and unknown dimensions of ARACKANUM. Again the lyrics deal with the confusing ways of so called Chaos Gnostic. This time combined with the aspect of destruction in form of the old Nordic giant Þjazi. Not familiar with the used old Swedish language (surprised?) this merely deals as a vague background description which acts a base construct for the music to unfold. Without it a major element of ARACKANUM‘s concept would be missing. A concept which of course mainly must be filled by the music.
And this the music does indeed. With the first note the listener is drawn into a maelstorm of musical chaos and insanity. In this case Chaos is not to be confused with unlistenableness. It’s more a metaphorical chaos bringing forth pictures to the mind’s eye. Where in the nineties we walked through dark and deep woods with ARACKANUM, the listener this time is thrown into cosmic storms of snow, soars through malicious dimensions until finally the journey is at an end. Welcome to Nifelheim!
Rarely but well placed breaks leave some room to take a breath, to throw a view into the ice-cold yet pulsating and strangely vividly chaos.
ARACKANUM make this possible by the use of aggressively, shredding and catchy riffs played in classic northern style, fast drumming and raspy hate filled vocals. The production is raw and powerful at the same time. As said before one gets short breaks in the form of slow and unexpected melodic parts which never get lost of the album’s rawness. On ÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞ ARACKANUM create such a damn dense atmosphere hard to be found elsewhere.
Directly with the first track Þórhati a hymn of ice-cold hate crushes over the listener. The following tracks continue in that way until with Þursvitnir and Þjóbaugvittr is grasped by sheer hypnotic raw-melodic greatness of ARACKANUM’s style of black metal.

These tracks are interrupted by a rather strange and in my opinion somewhat displaced sounding piece of instrumental music. Same goes for the following Þjazagaldr which seems to act as some kind of intro for the very distorted nearly droning Þá Kómu Niflstormum. Both tracks add a lot of atmosphere to the whole concept but definitely sound different compared to the other songs. I would have liked these tracks more if they would have been put on the album’s end. On the other hand – thanks to this the mid tempo hymn Þrú­kyn is even greater than it already is. After this two more songs come crushing down in the album’s beginning style and leave the listener on his own, sinking exhausted in his chair…

After quite a long time ÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞ finally is a black metal album which totally grabbed me. Apart from the three somewhat displaced songs ÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞ is pure black metal greatness. Friends of raw yet powerful old school black metal will enjoy this a lot (if needed - for some more prominent comparison I would list Ulver’s Nattens Madrigal and DarkThrone’s Panzerfaust). Ferocious, dark and sheer fantastic!