Kampen is almost one of the best black metal albums ever. It’s got tremendous energy and conviction, track after track of catchy songs, and a unique quirkiness that makes it special.

Kampen is most easily described as a Pagan-themed black metal album. Sole member Shamaatae’s muse is the god Pan, whose worship he channels into furious music that conveys as much ecstatic celebration as it does the more commonplace sinister obscurity.

Kampen’s rhythmic element is a major driving force in the album’s success. There’s nothing complicated going on here, but the steady beat and inspired playing provides a firm groove. The riffs and arrangements make for excellent songs, punctuated here and there (mostly at the end) with uncommon numbers, like a jangly guitar bit accompanied by a tambourine, or a lengthy atmospheric intro (that doesn’t use synthesizers for once!) that sets the stage.

But what is perhaps Kampen’s most shining element are the vocals. While the harsh vocals are superb, it is the implementation of clean vocals that takes the cake. These clean parts are very simple, and can often be made up of a single note, but they are an exquisite, indispensable part of the ecstatic celebration mentioned earlier. The clean vocals are unabashed, unaffected, and triumphant, conveying unadulterated enthusiasm in their almost nerdy delivery... and most of all, they are performed with genuine talent.

What makes Kampen fall just short of all-time greatness is the overuse of samples. It’s mostly the owl. The goddamn owl. There’s a track about half-way through the album that features a killer recurring melodic vocal theme, arising as the music swells, all punctuated by a semi-random (but oft-used) sample of an owl doing a single "whoo." At first, the song is nothing short of delightful, but toward the end, the owl starts to feel canned and synthetic, particularly in light of how prominently it is featured; and this impression only gets worse with each successive listen of the song... like, "oh, this is the song with the fucking owl." It gets to the point that enjoying the song is difficult because you’re perpetually anticipating the next occurrence of the dreaded canned "whoo."

Making the matter much worse is the same horrid bird (we’ll call him Blinky from now on) is all over Arckanum’s albums, which would be fine, but only if Shamaatae didn’t use the same accursed sample over and over. Grah.

Another element that the jury is out on is the remastered nature of the Debemur Morti Kampen re-issue. Re-masters are something to be wary of, particularly in metal. More often than not, it’s mostly the case of original master of the album re-compressed so that it seems louder and people will think it sounds more powerful. We’ve never heard the original Kampen, and while the Andy Classen re-master is a fun a vibrant affair, we have noticed the re-issue sounds better on a lower-quality stereo, where on a system with nice speakers, the bass tends to sound too hairy and the album can have trouble getting out of its own way, leading us to wonder if the original issue has better overall sound. We’d be keen to hear the original version for comparison. (8.5/10)