Primordial – Spirit The Earth Aflame (2010)

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Hailing from Ireland, Primordial is one of our top 50 bands from all times and “Spirit The Earth Aflame” is one of our all-time favorite albums. When we heard that Metal Blade was releasing this timeless classic we got psyched about the possibility of some great bonus material on this version of the album (we currently have 2 other versions).

If you know who Primordial is, you probably worship this album as much as any other fan of the band and can skip till the next paragraph of this review. If you don’t know who the band is, then we must tell you that this band was one of the first to successfully combine Celtic/Folk influences with aggressive Black Metal elements, giving them a very dark and powerful sound that was unheard off back in the late 90’s and early 00’s.

This re-released version features the entire original “Spirit The Earth Aflame” album (on the first CD) with no noticeable sound improvements (as far as we can tell). Songs like “Gods to the Godless” and our favorite “The Burning Seasons” are as epic as ever. Of the things added in the first CD we have a live version of “To Enter Pagan”.

The second CD features two tracks of the “The Burning Season” EP (“The Calling” and “Among the Lazarae”), it also has another live version of “To Enter Pagan” that is pretty shitty in our opinion. There are also live versions of “In Graciousness” and “The Black Art” that make our ears bleed and probably will be appreciated more by extremely hardcore fans of the band. We also have some live version cover songs of Bathory, and Rotting Christ that also suffer from very poor audio quality.

There are a few more other extra live tracks rounding up the combined total of tracks from both CD’s to a whopping 17 songs. However, our enjoyment was greatly affected by the extremely poor quality of the live tracks. We understand they are live songs but some mastering could have cleaned them up a bit in our humble opinion.

We recommend you get this CD is you don’t own a copy of the original pressing or the first ‘US’ version, or you are a hardcore fan of Primordial and can’t live without some bad quality live tracks. If you are very picky and want to avoid getting a bad impression from Primordial stick to CD 1 and venture to CD 2 with the understanding that the quality of these tracks does not remotely reflect how this band really sounds.

Band: Primordial Album: Spirit The Earth Aflame
Label: Metal Blade Records

Release: July 6th, 2010

Official Site myspace
Genre: Celtic/Folk/Black Metal

Country: Ireland

Rating: 75/100 Bonus material, the album it self is a solid 90/100
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