Vinterskugge
This is Fenris from Darkthrone's first solo album, and what a debut. It
contains three parts: first the actual Isengard tunes, then he has filled
the remaining space on the album with two Darkthrone demos. In total it's
over 60 min. The first part is superb with various styles of music - from
wild raw cold B.M. with grim vocals to more slow and harmonic tunes with
normal vocals, much like the later to
come Storm project. I like these songs a lot but the sound is just as poor
as on the Darkthrone albums if not even worse. The second and the third
part are fairly good with some very good songs and some that sucks. The
sound is pretty good considering it's two demos. I believe that these
songs are much better then the first Darkthrone album "Soulside Journey"
which is terrible. The style are almost the same but there is much more
spirit and better material on this one (If you count out a few tracks).
In total this is a very good release most thanks to the awesome songs:
Vinterskugge, Nagelfar and Storm of Evil.
Rated 
Høstmørke
The long awaited upfollower to Vinterskugge is finally here. Sense
Vinterskugge had some great potential where my expectations high.
Unfortunately they are not completely forfilled to 100%. The production is
as bad as earlier, the vocals are still mostly in Norwegian (which is good
sense Norwegian surely is a beautiful language) and it has the same very
distorted guitar sound. The songs are not as good as on Vinterskugge with
a few exceptions, the third track called "I kamp med hvite krist" (In
battle with white Christ" is one of the best ever, and "Total Death" is
also very good. The other songs just don't reach the same standard. One
song is also completely a capella and sounds really nice and then there
are a sort of humming to keyboards which is nice but will remind all
Swedish listeners of the intro to the children's program "Sagostunden"
from
when they where kids (ni vet den där när draken och de lustiga
människorna flyger iväg på en matta och lämnar gubben kvar som då får
resa iväg i kappsäcken), it's almost exactly the same song. The other
three songs are good but nothing special. The most irritating thing on
this album is the lousy sound, sure it fits some songs but it also ruins
other. Fenris did that in purpose sense he wanted it to sound demo-like
and I must say he has succeeded. A big minus is also the short playing
time
(32:13) not even half of what we heard on Vinterskugge.
Rated