More than 20 years into their career, Irish metallers Primordial are riding the crest of their greatest successes yet. Their 2007 full-length, To the Nameless Dead was the best album of that year and brought them not only their highest sales, but also the opportunity to tour North America for the first time as one of the head acts on the PaganFest, effectively placing them in a leadership role of the pagan metal movement. And deservedly so. Rooted in black metal (Metal Blade has reissued their earlier albums for anyone wishing to explore their formative works), Primordial’s sound is folk metal without the silliness or the costuming. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of drama in Primordial, but it comes from the music itself and the performance of frontman Alan “Nemtheanga” Averill, not from the antlers strewn about the stage. As I recall from seeing them on that tour, a trenchcoat and an Irish flag on one of the several guitar stacks was about as far as they went.

On that level, some of the material on their latest offering, Redemption at the Puritan’s Hand (also Metal Blade) could be seen as “playing it up.” Indeed, even the title lends itself to being taken as a reference to the band’s relatively newfound success on American shores – the US being the “puritan” in question – after so long toiling in obscurity. And with several of the earlier tracks especially featuring direct address from Averill to his audience in the lyrics – “Rise my brothers/Rise from your graves/No grave is deep enough/To keep us in chains” from memorable opener “No Grave Deep Enough” – and “I’ve told you once/I’ve told you a thousand times/No regrets/No remorse” from “Bloodied Yet Unbowed,” which is perhaps Primordial’s most explicit exploration of their own circumstances to date, one might call Redemption at the Puritan’s Hand their most crowd-conscious work yet. In the chorus of “No Grave Deep Enough” comes a genuine folk metal progression, which isn’t something they’ve actually done before (they’ve always been more Bathory than Skyclad), however much they’ve been saddled with that genre designation in reviews. I won’t call it a capitulation, because I don’t believe a band goes 20-plus years doing whatever the fuck they want and then gets a taste of mainstream metal success and suddenly abandons the ethic that got them there, but Primordial are a smart enough act to know what works for them, and on Redemption at the Puritan’s Hand, that’s exactly what they’re playing to. In a way, it’s meeting expectation in the songwriting, but there’s no question that Primordial are still engaging their followers on their own terms.

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There’s something misleading about the title of the split release Conan vs. Slomatics. I don’t doubt that there could be some element of friendly competition between the Liverpool and Belfast outfits, as there often is for bands on splits, tours, etc., but it’s not so much that the two trios are doing battle with each other, as the name suggests, instead teaming up to rip a hole in the fabric of the universe starting with your eardrums. I guess that would have been too long to use as the title of the release, so Conan vs. Slomatics it is. The disc comes by way of Head of Crom records and boasts three cuts from each act, though Conan use one of theirs for an interlude/introduction, to clock in at just under 37 of the heaviest minutes you’re likely to encounter this year. I mean it. This shit is monstrous.

Conan’s Horseback Battle Hammer was without a doubt the hardest-hitting debut I heard in 2010, and they maintain that grueling, unrelenting tonality on their tracks here. “Retaliator” festers in low end and still manages to sound clear, fuzzed out and righteous. Guitarist/vocalist Jon Davis and bassist/vocalist/synth-ist David Perry pull massive, inhuman weight from their instruments, and the sound of the band hinges on it. As “Retaliator” transitions into the minute-long spoken word/ring-out piece “Obsidian Sword,” that atmosphere is maintained, but it’s really just a transitional piece to set the stage for “Older Than Earth,” where the Robert E. Howard-obsessed band really unleashes the plod. Perry and drummer Paul O’Neill start the song for about the first of its total 11 minutes, and Davis joins in soon with feedback and a devastating pace that’s topped with simultaneous growls/shouts and clean vocals. More so here than on Horseback Battle Hammer, Conan show there’s more to their attack than just that tone, though, and “Older Than Earth” plays off some higher-frequency parts that aren’t as likely to vibrate your skull. As with “Obsidian Sword,” there’s no sacrifice in atmospheric weight, and so they make it work, but it should be interesting to hear how they play the varying feels off each other on their next album. If their Conan vs. Slomatics tracks are a preview of what’s to come in that regard, here’s looking forward.

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Dublin, Ireland‘s Primordial are nothing if they’re not hard to classify. The band, formed in 1987, could have been called black metal in their earliest work, but have long since transcended such easy genre-tagging. Because the lyrics of frontman Alan Averill come from a specifically Irish perspective and Ciáran MacUiliam (he and bassist Pól “Paul” MacAmlaigh are the remaining founding members of the band) has never been shy about incorporating Celtic influences, Primordial saw a major profile upgrade as part of the folk metal explosion in 2006-2008. In 2009, they toured the US for the first time as part of PaganFest.

Like many Americans, my first exposure to the band was 2005′s The Gathering Wilderness, which was their fifth album overall but first for Metal Blade Records, who also released To the Nameless Dead in 2007. By my judgment, To the Nameless Dead was the best album that came out that year, and though it would be two more years before I was able to catch the band live, I was still thrilled to do so. Likewise, now that Primordial have issued their first live DVD, All Empires Fall, I was equally excited to interview Alan Averill.

Averill is known for his opinions on a range of topics both music-related and not almost as much as his brash stage persona, and though All Empires Fall was the impetus for the conversation, there was more I wanted to get a sense of his feelings on social issues in his home country, where the Catholic church had at the time of our discussion just been in the news following more reports of sexual abuse by priests, and, by Averill‘s account, society has more or less collapsed.

To quote Marty DiBergi, “I got that. I got more. A lot more.” In the following Q&A, Alan Averill talks about the state of Ireland, his feelings on nationalism, economic hardships and rails against venues in the US for taking a percentage of merch sales from bands (which I’d never heard of before), through it all showing every ounce of the passion he carries with him into shows and onto albums.

Please enjoy the interview after the jump.

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You know, it probably should have occurred to me before, but I just didn’t think about it. Ireland‘s Mourning Beloveth first came to my attention after reading an interview a while back, and I never put two and two together (you’d think I’d be used to that by now). Mourning Beloveth — My Dying Bride?? It’s pretty much the same shit.

I was at my favorite NYC shop, Generation Records, and grabbed the 2006 Grau Records reissue of Mourning Beloveth‘s Dust (2001) basically because I was curious. Whether I actively wanted it is up for debate, but times are tough, and if you’re gonna go into a record store — especially a good one — the least you can do is buy something. Maybe that way they won’t all go out of business.

Whenever it was between then and now that I finally put on Dust for the first time, I literally laughed out loud at how much it sounded like My Dying Bride. Hey, I’m all for the melancholic Euro-doom sound, but this was over the top. Mourning Beloveth has put out three records since, including last year’s A Disease for the Ages, so I won’t profess to knowing how they’ve developed over the course of this decade, but it was uncanny. From the woeful progressions to the hyper-dramatized poetry reading vocals, it was The Dreadful Hours all over again.

And then, finally, I got it. Beloveth equals Bride. She’s already dead, so instead of My Dying, you’re already in Mourning. I don’t know if this is clever on the part of the band, or if they did it on purpose, or if they were just hoping no one would pick up on it. All I know is if it was their intent to sound just like My Dying Bride when they started out, they certainly accomplished that. And even though Mourning Beloveth allegedly formed in 1992 (their first demo wouldn’t come until four years later), that doesn’t mean MDB couldn’t have influenced them as they went along. If anything, all that says is they had more time to hone their own sound and they didn’t.

Again, not saying they couldn’t have become something wholly different in the years since. I genuinely wouldn’t know since I haven’t heard the records. Just saying that I probably should have put a little more thought into contextualizing the name Mourning Beloveth before I bought the album. Six bucks I won’t see again. Hindsight is… something or other.