Primordial: Where Greater Men Have Fallen

Primordial aren't a new band. They've been around upwards of 20 years, and Where Greater Men Have Fallen is their eighth album. By some accounts, they're Ireland's first-ever black metal band. Primordial aren't really a black metal band, at least at this point, but they're perfectly capable of launching into that hummingbird-blastbeat moody-noise thing. They really find liftoff, though, on a song like "Ghosts Of The Charnel House" - locking into a dinosaur-stomp riff, playing it slowly enough that it can really connect, and then letting frontman Alan Averill just open up his throat and howl. Averill has a set of pipes on him. The singer, who sometimes goes by the ungainly moniker A.A. Nemtheanga, is a classic metal wailer in the mold of Ronnie James Dio or Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson. We don't hear too many voices like his anymore: A full-bodied, high-pitched swooping eagle of a thing, a voice that makes everything around it sound bigger. When the band turns toward minor-key churn a