### Old Man's Child: Slaves of the world

#### 30/04/09 || Euthanatos

First time I heard of Galder and his Old Man’s Child project was with the “Ill-natured Spiritual Invasion” album. I enjoyed it, even bought it at the time, and shortly thereafter he joined Dimmu Borgir, which led me to completely lose interest in his career, since I really dislike Dimmu Borgir. Apparently he released two solid albums “In Defiance Of Existence” and “Vermin”, this last one supposed to be really good, but I confess I didn’t listen to a single song on any of those records. For some reason, I decided to revisit Galder’s work with this new release, and I’m glad I did.

For starters, Old Man’s Child has an approach which is quite different from Dimmu’s, even though they are still in that gray area of the modern and melodic black metal scene. As in they wear corpse paint and say they play black metal, except they really don’t. Anyway, while Dimmu has a really symphonic, epic and pretentious sound (and a terrible vocalist and everyone on the band is gay), Old Man’s Child is a lot more stripped down, a simpler and more aggressive type of metal. That’s probably the reason I find it much more appealing.

While the music in “Ill-Natured Spiritual Invasion” had a lot of influence from genres like death and thrash metal, something that was also immensely benefited from Gene Hoglan’s fantastic drumming, current Old Man’s Child has a much different tone, with more keyboards and complex passages in the song structures. The drumming also differs considerably, but that’s not a bad thing. Darkane’s Peter Wildoer is an incredible musician with just the right kind of stuff to make an album even more interesting.

Whether you listen to the bombastic power of “The Crimson Meadows” or the straightforward thrashing of “Unholy Foreign Crusade”, it it’s quite obvious that Galder has grown immensely as a songwriter. And while his vocals remain somewhat generic, the guitar playing has just enough inspiration to keep you interested in his endeavors.

I wouldn’t know if this is a better outing than the previous records Old Man’s Child had released, but it certainly is a good album, certainly a lot more interesting and brutal than what Galder does with Dimmu Borgir.

The cover: Not bad, satanic enough, I guess, although I’m not fond of photo montages.

7 old men who like to play with little boys out of 10.

- Information
- Released: 2009
- Label: Century Media
- Website: Old Man’s Child MySpace
- Band
- Galder: vocals, guitars, everything in between
- Peter Wildoer: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Slaves of the World
- 02. Saviours of Doom
- 03. The Crimson Meadows
- 04. Unholy Foreign Crusade
- 05. Path of Destruction
- 06. The Spawn of Lost Creation
- 07. On the Devil’s Throne
- 08. Ferden Mot Fienden’s Land
- 09. Servants of Satan’s Monastery