If you have heard of the Black Metal genre then you’ve heard of Dimmu Borgir. In 2010 Dimmu Borgir releases ‘Abrahadabra’; this is the return of a hired orchestra/symphony since ‘Death Cult Armageddon’. Throughout Abrahadabra the orchestra/symphony is featured in every song, which gives it an immense epic feel for a large part of the album. But before this album was even beginning to be recorded Dimmu Borgir as a band fired their bass player/clean vocalist ICS Vortex and Mustis the Keyboards player who both gave a lot of backbone to a lot of their more creative songs. After this news in early 2009, I didn’t even think they were going to be the same without them (ICS Vortex and Mustis), but Abrahadabra surprised me in a good kind of way. A month before Abrahadabra’s release Dimmu Borgir announced that Snowy Shaw is the new clean vocalist/bass player, the next day later he quit the band (thank god, his vocals sucked).
The first track, “Xibir” is the best intro track to fit the mood and style of his album. It also gives you a resemblance of how the rest of the album is constructed very epic in a lot of parts from the orchestra in every song, and this album features some kind of chanting chorus (don’t get me wrong the chorus was good I just can’t explain it any other way than chanting). The following track is “Born Treacherous”. This track has an interesting yet remember able riff in the opening. “Born Treacherous” is a great track but with any song it’s not always perfect the only bad part I heard from this song was the rhythmic opening of Shagrath’s vocals.
“Gateways” is the 3rd track of Abrahadabra. This is one of those songs that stand out in this album. It has a guest appearance for female vocals, Agnete Kjølsrud who is the former singer from Animal Alpha. Her vocals were kind of poor on her first verse but her second verse of singing made up for the poorer verse of singing beforehand.
"Chess with the Abyss" is next after Gateways. The song itself is worth the listen but it’s not a stand out. Like I said earlier every song has a downside because no song is perfect. This is also the first track were Snowy Shaw sings. Snowy Shaw’s vocals are indescribable; it’s extremely awful let’s just go with that (for me it was awful, and they did a poor job at trying to replace ICS Vortex). The same goes with "Ritualist" it started out great but the chorus made it go downhill, the chorus has the exact same structure as “Chess with the Abyss” but with different lyrics, and it’s the second song to feature Snowy Shaw with vocals, but the rest of the song was good beside those two parts of the song it was alright.
“Dimmu Borgir” the self titled song. There is no doubt when I say this, best song on Abrahadabra. The entire song never gets boring; Snowy Shaw doesn’t sing which is a good thing, parts of the song even sounds heroic from the composing of the orchestra.
“The Demiurge Molecule” the opening riff was a stand out on the guitar work so that’s good. “The Demiurge Molecule” is a very notable/interesting song because of the way how Shagrath uses his vocals it almost sounds like a form of a death growl that he developed.
The 8th track is “A jewel Traced through Coal” this song is one of the few songs that have guitar work oriented in the beginning, this one has tremolo picking for the beginning instead of power chord riffs, the song is more or less average.
The 9th song “Renewal” everything about this song was promising it had the most aggressive opening of the album, Shagrath uses a more aggressive vocal style similar to “The Demiurge Molecule” as well as Black Metal vocals, basically the entire song was going smoothly until you guessed it Snowy Shaw started to sing (I’m not trying to say that Snowy Shaw’s vocals ruin 1/3 of the album, he just ruined about three minutes of Abrahadabra. To me his vocals didn’t seem to fit in right with the three songs he was featured in).
Alright the last song of the album is "Endings and Continuations" it’s one of the best songs on the album, in actuality the song kicks in after a minute and a half of a soft intro that leads toward the start of the more aggressive part of the song. The chorus of "Endings and Continuations" had clean vocals from Kristoffer Rygg a.k.a. Garm, who did an excellent job with his part of clean vocals (tell you the truth he should’ve been doing the clean vocals that Snowy Shaw did). The very end of the song had Abrahadabra being repeated into a soft distance which would end the album.
Overall this album is a one big comeback to its predecessor ’In Sorte Diaboli’. Some may say Dimmu Borgir isn’t going to be the same because they fired two members a year before the recording of Abrahadabra. But if you look at it this way, this album is just one big step forward for the band for the next upcoming releases. The reason why I say this is is that by Dimmu Borgir hiring an orchestra will put them in track to hire other Symphonies and or Orchestras to put in for their next albums so that they have a more epic feel to the music consistently.
