RAISED FIST - From The North

Hailing from my childhood stomping grounds of Luleå, Sweden, Raised Fist were my first love. They dragged me kicking and screaming into the gateway pit that lead from departing Pennywise to the end station of Cephalic Carnage. As my gaze drifted westwards, my ears were to be long deprived of the teenhood hooks and brazen breakdowns served up with a Raised Fist.

During my long absence they released a 2009 album many thought would end up being their swansong- as nary a word came out of their camp until this week, six years later. That album- Veil of Ignorance- which I chanced upon five long years after its initial release, proved to be their strongest outing by far, and it’s spun so many times in the last few months that it’s making me dizzy.
It was, therefore, with great mirth that I awaited the birth of From the North, only to be bitterly disappointed by its every aspect.
A Raised Fist release comes with the prerequisite that it should make you move with the groove. To be fair, the groove is still there, but it just don’t move me no more.

Maybe it’s substitute drummer Matte Modin, of Dark Funeral fame, who’s failing to make my hips swerve, or maybe it’s the group’s communal effort - edge blunted by years of prolonged idleness - that has lost its former forceful bite. All I know is that something ain’t clicking the way it always used to, and time and time again I find the tunes have long since ceased vibrating the air around me without me so much as even noticing their absence.
From the North is like an aural anachronism served up by a band rudely awoken like Mel Gibson in Forever Young. [Epitaph]
- Bogi Bjarnason
More Bogi over at Eddies in the Tide of Regret.