This came out in 2001 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
When I saw that Finnish death-metal outfit The Black League boasted three — count ’em, three — former members and/or sidemen from unholy thrash gods Impaled Nazarene, I expected their debut album Ichor to be nothing short of a cacophony of chaos and brutality. Well, colour my blood-lust unfulfilled.
Turns out Ichor — Blood of the Gods in, I presume, Finnish — is more concerned with gloom and doom than grind and gore. This hour-long opus of melodic black metal gallops along on midtempo Euro-metal beats, with twin guitarists laying down a black wall-to-wall carpet of wah-wah power-chord majesty to cushion demonic growler Taneli Jarva’s incantations of sorrow and death. It’s a decently constructed dungeon of grief and anguish to be sure, but Ichor can’t hold a candle to the frenzied assault of the mighty Nazarene. Then again, what could?
