Not so many albums received that much premature praise as the new opus of the Norwegian Black Metal horde KEEP OF KALESSIN did. Additionally, the band’s own pre-release statements raised high hopes as well. And so it happened that the closer the release date approached, the more curious I became if Kollosus could live up to the expectations.
Giving it a first try, most people might be as surprised as I was: Kollossus has not that much in common with its predecessor Armada (although Armada actually was already a step away from traditional Black Metal) and even less with the earlier albums of the band.
Instead, the listener will discover a wide range of different styles to be mixed up. One can find very fast, but rather clean Metal tunes in eighties style (e.g. Against The Gods, Warmonger), thrashy parts as well as still some Black Metal elements, oriental or tribal-like themes, acoustic interludes and intros, even some balladic lines. To put it into a nutshell, it seems as if KEEP OF KALESSIN have tried to combine almost everything that can be summed up under the genus “Metal”.
Of course this is quite interesting even after several rotations in the player, but at least for me, it’s sometimes a little too much. With all the experiments made on Kollossus, I still like way more what the band did earlier, and that’s why my preferred tracks on this album are Escape The Union and Ascendant, as they are at least mostly in the style of Armada.
Maybe it’s not that wrong that front man O.C. claimed the band would nowadays play rather Extreme than Black Metal. I think fans that like the first two KEEP OF KALESSIN albums and are not much into experiments in their favorite Metal genre will be not that glad about the path the band runs now.
At all, the album is hard to categorize, technically excellent without a doubt, compositionally always interesting, but maybe slightly too experimental and inaccessible.
But also an album every metal fan should have listened to at least once…