I’m not one that champions re-releases very often. For the most part these are either marketing ploys to try and drum up excitement for a band nobody remembers or even worse it’s an attempt by an established band to make even more money off of records fans already own.

Every so often though a re-release comes along that I feel warrants the hoopla and Black Metal innovators Primordial’s “Imrama” is one of those albums. Originally released in 1995 this was one of the first albums that let people know Black Metal was growing and evolving as an art form. Eerie, gothic, ambient and then crushingly brutal Imrama reached out and slapped extreme music fans around the world with it’s new skew on Black Metal.

To be honest calling Primordial a Black Metal band is a lot like calling Rush a rock band, it doesn’t quite work. There’s too much going on in a Primordial album to pigeonhole them as one specific type of metal but the deep roots in Black Metal are there. Primordial do what all great bands do, they take a musical genre and turn it on itself, forcing new creative textures and ideas from it. Imrama does this by treating itself as a concept album, a record made up of moods and movements as opposed to just brutal song after brutal song.

Take the opening tune Fuil Arsa that manages to move through several musical landscapes in under five minutes. Beginning with an complexly arranged acoustic section the song easily moves from there to a combination between gothic thrash and straight Black Metal before breaking down into a spoken word section, back into the acoustic guitars and then ending with more brutality. At no point does the song sound forced or as if the parts don’t fit together. Everything works and everything bonds, this is Black Metal but it’s more and that makes it interesting.

The record keeps redefining itself as it continues. Imrama almost feels like a living thing, as if these various movements and ideas are deep breaths the album needs to survive. The second song Infernal Summer moves less like several parts together and more like a filter where sections are being pushed through it at the same time. First comes the Black Metal riff and blast beats but within that is ambient and harsh noise elements topped by gothic vocals nearly in the style of Bauhaus.

One of my favorite tracks on the album is The Darkest Flame, which begins with this beautiful and haunting melody that continues over a slow brooding musical section peppered with screechy vocals. I think one reason I dig is the bass solo in the middle with a narrative over it much in the vein of Iron Maiden.

From there the album continues to ebb and flow, allowing space where needed and then becoming harshly claustrophobic to make a point. High points like the bizarrely ambient Mealltach punctuate Imrama or the tribal meets acoustic tune Beneath A Bronze Sky. Don’t get me wrong though, there’s plenty of brutality to go around. Primordial are masters at bashing your face in until nothing it left but a smiling bloody pulp they just don’t feel like wasting it. That makes the brutal parts so much more effective.

I was also impressed with how the album flowed together even with all of the parts involved. It’s hard enough to string together simple songs, to try and make those songs complex is the sign of true musicianship but when you can combine all of it into a record that also flows as one piece that is when it becomes art.

If you already own the original release of Imrama or the 2000 re-release on Hammerheart Records you may still want to pick this one up. Along with a brighter and crisper sounding original record you get unreleased demo songs and a live DVD. As for the album itself Imrama is one of those albums that snuck up on the world. It not only ushered in a new age of Black Metal but also a new idea of what was possible within the realm of extreme music.