17 August 1998, first take. 5 September 1998, master finished. Between those two dates the five musicians Øystein G. Brun led into Woodhouse Studios in Germany recorded, mixed and mastered eight songs, and seven weeks after the last of them was sealed, on 26 October, Century Media sent The Archaic Course into the shops, a blade pulled from the quench before the steel had finished hardening, beaten out so fast that the hammer cracked the horn of the anvil. It cuts. It also chips, and every chip shows where the steel was still soft.
Third album from Borknagar, and half the smithy restaffed. The singer borrowed from Arcturus, Simen Hestnæs under the name I.C.S. Vortex, took the microphone from Garm, who had sung the first two records; Jens F. Ryland joined as a second guitarist beside Brun; Kai K. Lie stayed on bass, and Grim, the drummer who had played in Immortal and Gorgoroth, sat behind the kit for the last time on a Borknagar record. Ivar Bjørnson of Enslaved played synthesizer and effects on every track but one, without a place in the band line-up on the sleeve. Matthias Klinkmann recorded it and produced it with the band. Eight songs, 37 minutes and 46 seconds, nothing longer than five minutes and forty-four. A seax, not a greatsword.
"Oceans Rise" sets the pattern for everything after it. The verses come in under the harsh voice, the chorus throws the clean one high over the riffing, clean guitars cut channels through the middle of the song, and at the end the electric storm drops away and an acoustic coda lays the hot metal down to cool. Under all of it Grim's double bass splits the floorboards of the smithy, his last shift at this forge, while Kai K. Lie answers him with bass lines that move like a second melody instead of trailing the guitars like slag behind the pour. It is the most complete song on the record. It is not the boldest.
Then the mutiny. "Ad Noctum" is the one song whose music Vortex wrote and the one on which he, not Bjørnson, plays the keyboards, and he spends its four minutes and twenty-two seconds feeding a seventies Hammond organ sound into a black metal engine running flat out, the organ scouring the frost off the second-wave steel and inlaying paisley along the fuller while the guitars race it bar for bar. It should not work. It is the best four minutes here, and the clearest signal of where this band would take the metal once the singer had a hand on the hammer.
The new edge on the blade is the reason to hear this record and the reason it stops short of the very top. Vortex sings most of it clean, moving between a black metal rasp and a clean voice with a range wider than the songs strictly need, and on "Universal" the chorus builds the voice up step by step until it rings over the whole arrangement like struck steel. The same ambition costs him. On "The Black Token" he drives the voice past the point where it holds, the pitch wavers, and the mix, which keeps him further back than a singer of his size deserves, does nothing to cover the strain. Too much is hammered into the same bar as well: riffs, tempo changes and keyboard figures crowd the songs so tightly that the quiet passages, the thing "Oceans Rise" proves this band could do, rarely get the room they need.
The new edge on the blade is the reason to hear this record and the reason it stops short of the very top.
A song was left on the bench, too. "Vortex reminded me about an old tune that we prepared for the The Archaic Course recording session, but due to different reasons, never recorded," Brun told Decibel in an interview published on 20 June 2012, with the singer back in the band. Not every hand that worked this steel stayed at the forge. This was the last Borknagar album with Grim, and he died in October 1999.
The blade still finishes true. "Winter Millennium" carries the strongest vocal ending on the album, the clean voice rising over the last bars like a white-hot bar lifted from the coals, and the instrumental "Fields of Long Gone Presence" sheathes it in two minutes and eighteen seconds. Under thirty-eight minutes, and none of them idle.
This is the pattern the Borknagar records after it were forged to: the clean voice along the edge, the organ inlaid in the steel, black metal as the core of the blade and no longer the whole of it. It is brittle in places and chips wherever the singer overreaches. Between The Olden Domain and Quintessence it stands as the forging in which the band learned to temper its music around a voice.