Cold Spring just reissued two of Folkstorm's out of print albums earlier this year, which has been cause for much rejoicing around the C-Blast shop. A solo project from Nordvargr that was active through the late 90's through the beginning of the decade, Folkstorm picked up in some ways where his previous band MZ.412 left off, taking a brutally heavy mix of death industrial and power electronics and infusing it with a very subtle black metal undercurrent. This resulted in a handful of albums under the Folkstorm name that have gone one to become some of my favorite black-industrial albums, each one super harsh and evil sounding, with trace levels of black metal guitar buried beneath vicious waves of electronic chaos. Some of this stuff even reminds me of the more noise/industrial leaning Abruptum material, though there is no denying that the Folkstorm is firmly rooted in the power electronics aesthetic. Both 2000's Victory Or Death and 2004's Sweden have been reissued by Cold Spring, and both are highly recommended if yer into extreme, intensely evil blackened PE.

2004's Sweden was the final release from Folkstorm, a brutal blast of blackened death-industrial that has even more overt black metal qualities than Nordvargr's previous releases under the F-storm name. Cold and relentless, the ten tracks that make up Sweden foreshadow the demonic necro-industrial that would take form on later Nordvargr releases, and the sum effect is that of having your soul shredded through an assembly-line series of infernal machines for nearly an hour. Much of the material here is brutal distorted industrial noise, chunky blasts of squealing feedback and low-end machine-roar and Merzbow-like levels of violent freeform distortion, but buried in these deafening bursts of noise are glimpses of ferocious droning black metal riffage (check out the first track!), super-distorted shrieking vocals, fractured slabs of crushing rhythmic throb, old recordings of military music corroded by massive levels of white noise, even some pulsating distorto-blasts that come close to sounding like some sort of fucked-up gabber (as on track eight). Yeah, this is tough stuff, locked in a killing mode for almost the entire album that's only occasionally tempered by stretches of evil black ambience and cavernous machine clank; compared to the later Nordvargr/Vargr material, this is more rooted in classic Swedish death-industrial, but it's some of the heaviest fucking death-industrial ever with a heavy emphasis on distorted guitars. Absolutely essential to fans of Nordvargr's singular black industrial vision.