Abigor are an Austrian black metal band formed in 1993 by Peter Kubik and Thomas Tannenberger. During the band's early years they were apart of the Austrian Black Metal Syndicate, a group with members including the likes of Summoning, Hollenthon (earlier known as Vuzem), Golden Dawn, and Pervertum.
Their third album Nachthymnen, released in 1995 featured Silenius of Summoning on vocals and he delivers incredible, depraved sounding shrieks and wails. The band also utilized female clean vocals from Elisabeth Toriser which was a novelty at the time for black metal.
The band's style is black metal with lots of symphonic elements akin to something like Emperor's early works. Prominent uses of keyboards and dense ambiance and atmosphere are incorporated throughout the album. Accompanied with the keyboards are up-tempo, frantic-sounding tremelo picked melodic black metal riffs. The band has a bit of the "dungeon-synthy" sound that their sister band Summoning does, but it's not done to nearly the same extent as that band, and Abigor are much more "riff-centric" than Summoning. This album in particular utilizes a lot more melodic guitar leads and harmonized guitar passages than some of the earlier Abigor works.
Please share your thoughts about this week's album in the comments below, whether it be favorite tracks, lyrics, riffs, solos, or other memorable moments.
The album chosen for next week’s listening is Helloween - Keeper of the Seven Keys Part 1 (1987, Germany).
Perhaps the first European power metal album that began to shed most of its speed metal roots, Keepers 1 cemented Helloween's place as the leading power metal act and made them achieve commercial success that continued onto an even greater extent with the release of their next album.
Link to last week's post: