Amon Amarth Album Ranking.

Okay, so we’re finally here. I have finally listened to all of the Amon Amarth albums. (The ones that aren’t B-sides or covers or other things, but just main, studio ones.) As the band that I have pictured on my work profile, which is pretty good, I guess, meaning a large percentage of my profile pictures in existence are Amon Amarth (just that one, I mean!), they are one of my favorites, but that said, I have unfortunately come to something different from my view of Megadeth’s catalogue, at the end of theirs.

Whereas with Megadeth, I found a decent amount to like in the last few I got around to, which did include Risk and The World Needs a Hero, the latter of which I just love, with Amon Amarth, I got to a two-album bottleneck at the end, and both of them, Deceiver of the Gods and, yes, The Great Heathen Army, I have found not only somewhat disappointing in terms of just kind of sounding like Amon Amautopilot, but I have also found, at least with the former one, kind of unpleasant, too. It just feels like the most abrasive and yet the least refreshing mixture of their sounds, with a little of the nice Jomsviking Disney-Amarth in there, or the Iron Maimarth, but mostly just the rougher parts of Surtur Rising, without it having risen up again in my estimations because it’s just kind of awesome, like that album is.

Thus, I have spent this long waiting to just sort of . . . put those two albums at the end, anyway. But, anyway, this is the list, here is the ranking.

12. Deceiver of the Gods

Yes, something about this album just grates at me. I don’t know why, and for the record, it does feel like more of a possible grower than The Great Heathen Army does, but I just find the whole thing kind of unpleasant. I like the last song, actually, and tonight I was thinking it might be my waypoint into the rest of it, similarly to how “Arson” worked for With Oden on Our Side, or the first track worked for Jomsviking (I never forgot, how good that song sounded) the first time I heard it, but with songs like “Hel” just sounding kind of warmed over and painful and “Shape Shifter” sounding, I guess maybe kind of stagey? Well, this whole album feels like a lot of bombast that doesn’t hit with encouragement but rather like deflation.

11. The Great Heathen Army

I don’t hate this album, but if anything sounds like a windless bag of Amon Amarth, this is it. It’s just . . . imagine Berserker without the cool riffs and fun stories and singing, but just sort of nothing but the tiredness. It’s “When Once Again We Set Our Sails” without the wistfulness, or at least without any of it that lands. It’s “Raven’s Flight” without being an actually awesome song (i. e., just a copy of “As Long as the Raven Flies” and nothing much more to go on, with it, which is what “Saxons and Vikings” sounds like, in the wake of something like the finisher track to With Oden on Our Side). To go back an album further, it’s “Back on Northern Shores” without the cool emotional component. It’s just . . . nothing. Probably my favorite song thus far, on it, the somewhat rousing “Find a Way or Make One,” feels like a “Way of Vikings” that doesn’t actually become the cool song it set out to be, but instead remains the kind of soulless pump-up song it initially sounds like it was going to be. It really just does feel like Amon Amarth digging through the history books to find some more stuff to talk about.

10. Surtur Rising

Now, this is a big step up. It may be meaningful that I didn’t like this album all that much until somewhat recently, and it would be nice if the two below this one turn out that way, too (in that case, I think number 12 will rise higher than number 11, because my sticking point with this album was also that it sounded similarly unpleasant), but there seemed to be a little more here that appealed to me a lot sooner than the stuff on Deceiver of the Gods, and it’s sort of similar with Berserker to The Great Heathen Army. Anyway, this album is just epic, and whereas I would say I don’t particularly like the two before this, at least not yet, I like this album a whole hell of a lot. The way Johan dials up his voice on the chorus to “Live without Regrets” (“Show no fearrr!”), and the way the guitars just crush you throughout the album, and even the way “Doom over Dead Man” sounds kind of anemic, which I didn’t particularly like until I found it analogous to my favorite song off of With Oden on Our Side, “Arson,” and the cool, kind of wispy feeling of that one, this one just hits hard from beginning to even the less-hard-hitting end.

9. Berserker

It pains me not to put this higher, but it’s just not quite up to the level of the rest of Amon Amarth’s work. That said, it was probably the perfect album to start with. I had heard “Raven’s Flight” in prison, and I loved it. I didn’t even know what death metal was, literally, or that this would be more of the “melodic death metal” that my friend talked about in middle school as being what he liked (he liked Dimmu Borgir, back then, which is actually deemed I think melodic “black metal,” but, anyway) to listen to, but I knew that this driving, sort of epic fantasy of the sounds mixed with the gruff-but-understandable growling of the lead singer appealed to me. And while the rest of this album doesn’t quite measure up to that song, which as I said in the Great Heathen Army paragraph is in itself an obvious copy of their previous song, “As Long as the Raven Flies,” which not only has similar lyrics but actually has kind of the same sounds and rhythms, I can find something to like about pretty much all of it, from the nice story setting of “The Berserker at Stamford Bridge” to the “Way of Vikings”–esque pump-up sounds of  “Shield Wall” to the infinitely fun opener, and while nothing quite gets away from the feeling of tiredness, which, let’s be honest, Amon Amarth has been struggling with since maybe Surtur Rising or even a little bit of Fate of Norns, even, they manage to break out of it at every turn, producing perhaps the first truly, and only, Radio album of their career.

8. Once Sent from the Golden Hall

Here’s a mood album. I’m not sure I’ve ever given this one its due, but it feels like every time I put it on, I kind of have it on in the background. Sometimes it comes through and grabs me, like with the transition from “Without Fear” into “Victorious March,” which are just a one-two punch on par with the beginning of Rust in Peace, for my money, but not as flashy or as obvious (something about that marching atmosphere just kills it, for me), and just . . . this album is a lot of fun, the growls of Johan are really more like screams or shouts, and there’s even one where he says, “Attack!” that seems to me to be a representation of what Eminem might have sounded like with his classic line, years later (“Now, here I come, screamin’ ‘Attack’ like I just stepped on one!”), and it just feels more like the rabid-dog Johan Hegg that you get in the first three albums, or so, before he went full-on into enunciation. Like with his voice, the album just doesn’t feel as clear or well-defined as a lot of the other ones, and it kind of feels like sort of moods put into the Amon Amarth sound font rather than songs, but it is good. It is fine. It is a good Mood album.

7. Jomsviking

This is the Disney movie of Amon Amarth. In all of their albums, they sing about the travails and the trials of the Vikings, generally, or at least events and musings from that aesthetic. However, they have one album that I understand to be a concept album, and it’s this story of a particular Viking who basically gets exiled from his society and then becomes some kind of mythical, legendary warrior for the Viking group he enters, or at least comes off that way, and then after elegizing a king, going on many journeys, and sort of channeling Daft Punk for a training song where Johan somehow pulls off the most straightforward example of Amon Amarth playing into their caricature by literally having a chorus say, “It’s the way of Vikings,” and the whole thing basically feels like a Disney adventure through the Amon Amarth Viking aesthetic. And the guitar work and drums make it all feel like it’s animated in full color, before you. The story is simple but works as a mural for the usual adventures and tragedies of the Viking life that you would see in one of their albums. Johan’s voice sprays out ice chips on songs like “Vengeance Is My Name” and “One Against All” while the guitars go all Iron Maiden on nearly every song, moving from the grinding maw of the usual Amon Amarth guitars to specific, synchronized rainbows of melody that bring this from melodic death metal to something that sounds almost more New Wave of British Heavy Metal (or at least Power Metal)–style clear compositions, which they were getting into before but felt almost genre-changing, on this one. Probably the Zenith of this particular style, with the next two, Berserker and The Great Heathen Army, feeling like echoes of it without quite as much color, and it’s a blast right up until the surprisingly striking refusal by the hero’s love interest and then the true return of the story’s protagonist, with him being led into Freya’s hall. It gets a lot out of a lot of fun, entertaining material of a grim but still colorful version of an Amon Amarth version of a beloved 90s animated classic. If you follow, with this. That said, there’s just enough of a sense of them losing their momentum that it’s not totally transcendent but partially contrived, but . . . the whole thing works so well that what you think you will tire quickly of actually improves over time, just like Iron Maiden’s A Matter of Life and Death.

6. With Oden on Our Side

This feels to me like . . . actually, in listening to it again, I think I have finally shifted over to seeing why this is known as part of their best three-album streak, with Fate of Norns before it and Twilight of the Thunder God after it. The maelstrom of the guitars in the opening song feels like the pinnacle of something, like someone taking their final form, and it just continues, sounding like what I don’t hear a lot of said, black metal, which Amon Amarth kind of drift over into within their death metal Lord of the Rings songs. The haunting, droning guitars and the repetitive, hypnotic rhythms are pretty much right from the other genre. It’s like an upbeat Dissection with a lot more meat on its bones, in terms of just the bigness of the sound. When you allow yourself to step into it, you feel like you’re in a fucking plains windstorm. Riding on horseback! At that. And Johan sounds perhaps his most emotionally rich while delivering their best lyrics on a wave of their most clear enunciation, too.

5. Twilight of the Thunder God

Until you get to . . . Twilight of the Thunder God. This is where their albums get just unreal, in terms of how richly revealed their melodies are and how fun their lyrics are, in their morbid and yet sort of huggable way, the heroes not always perfect but usually very well drawn out, almost like the characters in a Stephen King novel, just quickly created and yet perfectly realized. This one feels sort of like a concept album, too, now that I think about it. But perhaps it’s just a testament to how good the album sounds and how gorgeously textured their aesthetic that it doesn’t seem like a somewhat forced story in the usual way, but actually good enough not to realize they’re telling you one at all, as opposed to the pretty obvious presentation of and kind of constructed feeling of even classic albums like The Wall and those in other genres like I Phantom and if you want to consider it different enough to categorize separately from the rock of The Wall that feels more similar to the intricacy of these death metal musicians, something like American Idiot, both of which have their high points but feel obviously stilted to be story presentations, all of these this could just be stories of a similar nature set up together, or not even a story at all, if you’re not thinking about it. That beats Jomsviking out for Naturalism.

4. The Avenger

Now, stepping back away from the story aesthetics of the last two albums (which sound different from the one before them, but that’s three storytellers in a row, and pretty much all of their albums have songs that do), this one feels more like a mood set on par with Once Sent from the Golden Hall, but just has a consistency that feels more adventurous and fun and positive than the darker sounds of that one. It has peak Johan before he went from wild man that sounds partially beast, too, to the telegraphing style of lyrics, in a complimentary sense, because who else does this much fun with this much perfect understandability? He does some good things with that voice, but this along with numbers three and one below sound more gruff and uncompromising, and only the second hasn’t stayed in the more organic and weatherworn earlier style of his. This is probably the peak of mood Amarth, but there are three that transcend even its pure exhilaration with perfectly tuned precisions.

3. The Crusher

This is the more presentable, songified version of the previous two releases, The Avenger and, before it, Once Sent from the Golden Hall. It feels like the moods have finally congealed together into balls, and they are hypnotic, black-metally excursions into feeling, with not even all that much to say except that they have reached a level of control with their gradients over the air into a set of trappings that feel more like a set of songs than a series of changes in the temperature of a room.

2. Fate of Norns

And, here’s where they do a little Jomsviking within every song, it seems like, from the Games of Thrones–like tale of a man who has lost his son and sends him on the traditional journey home (in so many words) in “The Fate of Norns,” also a fun example of a title track for an album that is actually slightly longer than the album title, itself, to the waving winds over an unspeakable tragedy of a house burning down in the aptly titled but perfectly filmed mental movie, “Arson.” In that song, something that sounds sort of vague or abstract takes on an impressively detailed cast in a way that makes Amon Amarth’s brand of death metal feel more like HBO episodes, or, let’s not degrade them, actual classic literature than shots from a horror-movie trailer, and yet remaining as grim and R-rated as a popular fantasy epic might be, these days.

1. Versus the World

And that leads us to the hardened diamond at the center of the Amon Amarth catalogue, fully transitioning over into the song structures of later albums but maintaining their thickest veneers of misty rawness of their career, with the album not even feeling like a set of songs as much as a series of cold battlefields and battles of sound that you get lost in, until you begin to pick out the parts, as the lyrics begin to set in as not being sort of bland and forgettable but like established classics in olde poetry. Not too bad, for a band dubbed Viking Metal. It’s everything from the perfect wistfulness of the end-of-life Viking story “Across the Rainbow Bridge,” now that I think about it one of the few songs that explores the stuff that happens after your life at all in music, of all genres. “Hellbound” by Eminem (and particularly J-Black) does that pretty well, but not often do you follow a character transitioning into the realms after these ones. And pretty much everything else feels as thick with emotion and meaning. The guitars are just perfect, probably their most polished, unassuming melodies that just come alive after awhile. No one does an album both intimidating and exciting as this one is.