Warthur
Having perfected their classic sound on Dol Guldur, Summoning spent three years to produce what turned out to be more of the same on Stronghold. It's a good, listenable album which features everything we've come to expect from Summoning - fantasy-inspired lyrics based around mournful nostalgia and depression, plentiful references to Tolkien, and an epic style of black metal which sounds like the soundtrack to a battle in a fantasy movie - but it feels a bit by-the-numbers this time. This time around the use of synthesiser seems to have been scaled back somewhat, and on the whole it doesn't seem quite as removed from the rest of the black metal pack as the excellent Dol Guldur did, but it's still a good enough listen if you're a Summoning fanatic, even though it isn't one of their more essential releases.