For a band so clearly invested in tales of invasion, war, and conquest, Sweden’s Amon Amarth is a strangely lead-footed target, so listless and uninterested in change that they’d make for an easy capture on a Norse battlefield of old. During the last two decades, they’ve released nine albums of headstrong Viking metal, built almost entirely around tales of shared Scandinavian heritage and tunes that either charged like a massive military’s frontline or sailed skyward like a hard-earned victory chant. The best of those records (by mere example, see with Oden on Our Side and Versus the World) have felt both urgent and addictive, combining death metal heft and modern rock-ready hooks to build and brandish verifiable anthems. Indeed, to see Amon Amarth live is to see almost all of an audience throw hands or horns at once, chanting along to stories of wins in war and glory in the afterlife. They are a sort of turbocharged Cliff’s Notes to The Poetic Edda and The Prose Edda, a modern metal band revivifying ancient history with unwavering conviction.
There’s little reason to suspect, then, that Amon Amarth will soon run out of stories to sing; their potential pool of subjects is, in essence, a culture’s complete heritage, and they’ve got tales of Oden and Loke to share yet. And there’s always the option of fan-fiction, or creating imagined sagas of pugnacity and defeat from the lore itself. Of late, though, Amon Amarth has started to run out of, if not songs, then novel ways to make their stories really stick within those songs. After an incredible streak of righteous albums, 2011’s Surtur Rising sometimes felt overly stiff and deliberate, as if Amon Amarth were trying to bully past the limits of their own Viking brand. But the new Deceiver of the Gods feels formulaic and tired, as if the long-running quintet has now settled into the complacency and comfort of their reputation-- bad news, of course, for warriors who end songs with shouts of “Now we attack! Ride into fate!” At last, Amon Amarth has made a record that is every bit as rote, uninspired and matter-of-fact as a set of Cliff’s Notes. In the past, they’ve sounded strangely uplifting; this time around, they simply sound persistent.
The symptoms start as early as the opening title track, a thrashing sprint that flatlines in the chorus and rebounds a bit in a chant-along bridge but ultimately stumbles into a solo so tepid and predictable that it nearly necessitates skipping right along to the next track, “As Loke Falls”. Amon Amarth at least displays some vivacity there, volleying a riff between drums blasts like a game of pinball. Frontman Johan Hegg sounds convincing here, too, delivering the tale of Ragnarök’s end less like a storyteller than a witness. In fact, Hegg is compelling throughout most of Deceiver of the Gods, and he’s got good material to offer. His account of a brutal murder technique called Blood Eagle makes for fine pulp fiction, while “Shape Shifter” uses the life of the god Loke to discuss betrayal and a necessary balance of light and dark. In fact, reading Deceiver of the Gods is arguably more engaging than listening to most of it. The band behind Hegg seems exhausted or, at the very least, over it. They push ahead with the same up-tempo roil so much that any break at all-- be they the sampled sounds of murder at the start of the gruesome “Blood Eagle” or the psychedelic guitar spirals that introduce closer “Warriors of the North”-- are welcome, overdue diversions. Candlemass’ Messiah Marcolin guests on “Hel”, but Amon Amarth is so unyielding that the best they can do is let him moan in the background like Marianne Faithful.
It’s not that anyone’s now hoping for Amon Amarth to be metal’s great hybridizers or innovators. Nine albums into a career, no-one expects them to suddenly lace their battle hymns with electronics or noise or to write brilliant black metal bursts or dramatic post-rock crescendos into their records. But Amon Amarth boasts a lot of their own skill, bravery and brilliance within their songs; they are a small army of “endless wrath” and “the walker on the wind” and “fast in thought, quicker tongue.” Here, though, those are only hollow words, self-righteousness from a band bloated on their own lofty reputation and sales history. On Deceiver of the Gods, they are satisfied with plugging 10 new anecdotes into 10 songs they’ve made before and, unfortunately, will most likely make again.
