✦✦✦✧ So, when I said that Ihsahn is my favorite Norwegian composer since Edvard Grieg, I didn’t mean that he had to go quite so orchestral with the music. The lush arrangements here often work, but when they don’t work, they sound as awkward as Michael Kamen and the SF Symphony’s contributions to Metalica (ie, conspicuous and ill-fitting).

✦✦✦✧ This is a subtler work from Ihsahn (which is funny, because the album starts out with this huge-ass synth patch that sounds anything but subtle). The epic power comes from the impeccable arrangements and production, featuring the lushest strings I’ve heard in metal in a long time. The songwriting is a bit “safer” than that on “Arktis,” but Ihsahn still delivers solid doubles throughout, if not actual home runs.

✦✦✦✦ This is more like it! The album reaffirms the role of its predecessor, Das Seelenbrechen, as a lateral digression, and is more of an logical and spiritual successor to Eremita… but Arktis blows it away in its scope, ambition, and effectiveness. I could mention the handful of notable guest musicians on this record, but the real star here is the varied approaches to songwriting.

★★☆☆ The entire album features Ihsahn at his most cinematic. This is both a testament to one of the most inventive and prolific musicians in metal today… and a big problem for the listener. Every track sounds like it’s excerpted from somewhere in the middle of a soundtrack. There are no real starts or finishes here, so the whole thing is more comparable to Fantomas than any concept album, or anything else that Ihsahn has done post-Emperor.