Black Metal Roundup

I've been buying so much music recently that it's been hard to find time to listen to it all but it just so happened that this week four black metal albums fell into my hands at about the same time, providing a convenient theme for a post.

First up we have Odinist: The Destruction Of Reason By Illumination by French act Blut Aus Nord. This album nicely achieves a balance between black metal's love of dirty production and the need to actually hear what's going on. The production is surprisingly crisp, especially on the drums, but has a good messy wash to the guitars and vocals that gives it some grit but not so much that the melody is obscured. The sound of the album is very reminiscent of Mayhem's most recent record Ordo Ad Chao, which preceded Odinist's release by about six months. The riffs share a similar spiralling, unsettling, atonal style and the drumming reminds me a little of Hellhammer (Mayhem's drummer), alternating between straight up blast beats and pleasingly syncopated stuttering, both driven by a kick drum that sounds crisp but not so much so that it turns into the dreaded typewriter trigger. The vocals are kind of relegated to the background but are pretty good and I must once again make the comparison with Ordo Ad Chao as they are quite similar to those of Attila Csihar on the latest Mayhem release (but not to his comical gibbering on De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas).

Odinist is a pretty good listen despite the fact that every song is in an identical style; so much so that while I'd be able to recognise a song off this album quite easily I'd never be able to tell you what the title or even the track number is. Fortunately the song they repeat is a good one and doesn't wear out it's welcome over the album's brief forty minute running time.

Obligatory Black Metal Gimmickry: Blut Aus Nord's take on the black metal philosophy appears to be informed largely by mysticism (and particularly Crowley, who's writing provides the album's subtitle). In other words, the same old same old.

Agalloch's The Mantle isn't exactly black metal, but it is folk metal of a kind that has a history often interwoven with that of black metal so I'll call it close enough to include in this post. Despite the presence of distorted electrics in the background Agalloch's songs are primarily driven by clean acoustic guitars, although on the other hand the vocals give the music its tentative black metal connection, alternating between clean singing and a gurgle/whisper that's 100% black metal derived. The overall effect is actually quite cool and original. Acoustic guitar strumming accompanied by subdued distorted electric rhythm guitar, straight up rock drumming, black metal vocals and flamenco lead guitar is something I certainly admit I've never heard any other band try. The result is a melancholy and dreamy vibe that still has the energy and epic sense of metal. I must admit though that I'm not as keen on this album as I am on Odinist, as even though The Mantle has far more variety over the course of a full hour I always tire of it before the end. Nevertheless it's still well worth a listen.

Obligatory Black Metal Gimmickry: I have to admit that I haven't checked the lyrics but Agalloch seem to be invoking extreme environmentalism, with lyrics and a mood that evokes the natural world and song titles like 'A Celebration For The Death Of Man...'. This is a nice twist on the usual black metal bullshit, and one that a few bands seem to have adopted in recent times.

Which leads us to Wolves In The Throne Room's first album Diadem Of Twelve Stars. Last year saw the release of Two Hunters, an absolute masterpiece which took the evil sounding trappings of black metal, added the occasional soaring female vocal and rendered it into something positive and uplifting. Transcendent, to use the band's own term. It took just one listen of Two Hunters to make Wolves by far my favourite black metal band but I still kept my expectations for their first album modest, and sure enough it doesn't quite live up to the standard of it's successor. All the elements that made Two Hunters so great are already present, dual guitars in a wash of distortion creating more of a texture than a melody and heaviness blended seamlessly with melancholy and their trademark transcendent, uplifting mood. Unfortunately it's held back from greatness by a vestigial concern with riffage (not their strong point) and other conventional metal trappings, as well as songs with excessive lengths outstripping the quality of the ideas therein contained. Listen to Two Hunters and give Diadem Of Twelve Stars a go too only if you're really into it.

Obligatory Black Metal Gimmickry: These guys are another bunch of extreme environmentalists, playing gigs out in the forests over there in California and living in a country lodge 'off the grid'. It doesn't factor too much into their music however, beyond the fact that they focus on the wonder of the natural world to the exclusion of other traditional black metal topics.

The story with Shining's IV: The Eerie Cold is quite similar to that of Diadem. Last year Shining released V: Halmstad, a fucking brilliant blend of prog and black metal, but as with Wolves' first album I found this predecessor lacking. Mind you in all other ways Shining may well be the absolute antithesis of Wolves In The Throne Room. For a start they come from the other side of the world (Sweden). Secondly their take on black metal is totally evil (more on this when we get to their gimmickry section) where Wolves are about as positive as black metal ever can be. Thirdly as opposed to Wolves' skill at mood and texture, Shining excel in the area of straight up metal riffing. Not a track goes by without at least one passage with a groove so fucking powerful that you can't help but nod your head and stamp your foot, which is a little peculiar considering that it comes from a band who's main lyrical focus is desolation, depression and suicide. More in line with expectations for a band with such an image are the ghastly vocals and the maudlin piano and cello interludes, which are also very good. Shining's style and riffs may be derived from typical black metal tremello picking and gurgled vocals but they have very much evolved into their own unique kind of music, incorporating a straight up rock energy and creating something that may be very dark and dismal but is incredibly catchy at the same time.

As with Wolves though, The Eerie Cold is but an inferior copy of its successor. For every head bangingly awesome riff on this album, it is still just an imperfect precursor to an even awesomer one on Halmstad. Nevertheless whereas Diadem Of Twelve Stars is a little tedious to listen to The Eerie Cold is still a solid album, even if it does always make me want to put on Halmstd immediately afterwards.

Obligatory Black Metal Gimmickry: Suicide (amongst other things of a similarly offensive nature). These guys claim to be proud of a number of suicides in their native Sweden that may or may not have been caused by their music. Having watched a few interviews with Shining's obnoxious frontman Kvaroth (and listened to the annoying monologue at the start of The Eerie Cold a couple of times) it must be noted that this band's conceits deserve to be labelled gimmickry more than most. When pretty much everything they do or say seems calculated for maximum offensiveness and obnoxiousness with no consistent philosophy behind it I think it's safe to say that they don't really mean it. (Even if it was pretty funny when Kvaroth called that interviewer a troglodyte.) It's just like that Calvin and Hobbes cartoon: “The fact that these bands haven't killed themselves in ritual self suicide already proves that they're in it for the money just like everyone else.”

Years in Music

I've had surprisingly little 'home in front of the computer' time this week, so in lieu of writing a real post I'm going to participate, slightly tardily, in this meme that has been floating around in which you pick an album for every year that you've been alive. The exact criteria for the choices are left quite vague, so I'm approaching it with the idea that I'll pick the album that is most closely associated with that period of my life.

1980:
That said, for obvious reasons it's a bit hard to do so for my pre-teen years. In fact it's almost impossible to pick anything at all for the first few entries, since for most of the early Eighties it's hard to even find albums that I've even heard for some years. So my first pick is Flash Gordon by Queen. I've never heard the album, but I sure loved that title track when I was 10. “Flash! Aah ahh!”

1981:
This is the only year out of the twenty eight that I'm genuinely at total a loss to pick anything for so I'm going to go with Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports, even though I've never heard a second of it, just because I always liked that guy.

1982:
In contrast 82 is actually an easy one. Dire Strait's Love Over Gold was the first album I ever fell in love with. At the age of two I probably wasn't that fussed about it, but I really got into it once I turned five!

1983:
Pink Floyd - The Final Cut. It wasn't until fifteen years later that I actually heard it, but as covered previously here I still have a soft spot for the Pink Floyd album that everyone else hates.

1984:
This is another tricky pick due to scarcity of decent music that I'm familiar with from 1984, but I'm going with Metallica's Ride the Lightening, even if I don't think I've ever listened to it once all the way through. Eighties metal deserves to be namechecked at least once on this list.

1985:
Again I'm going to go with Dire Straits. Brothers in Arms has always felt like the quintessential Eighties album to me, which is perhaps a little strange given that it's a throwback to Seventies stadium rock in the era of new wave and synthpop, but it sure got played a lot around my house.

1986:
It would be remiss of me to leave Coil off the list! Horse Rotorvator is certainly not my favourite album of theirs, but it's far and away the best thing I could find for 86.

1987:
I'm going to reprise 1983 here and go with Pink Floyd's A Momentary Lapse of Reason. Yet another album that everyone hates, but that I grew to enjoy before I was told that I wasn't supposed to like it.

1988:
And just as it would be unjust to forget Coil, it would also be unforgivable not to mention Skinny Puppy, one of the few good things to come out of a wretched musical decade. Again, VIVIsectVI is one of my less liked albums of theirs, but it's still the best thing I could find listed for a crummy year.

1989:
The Cure's Disintegration. It would probably be more honest to pick NIN's Pretty Hate Machine, but that band is going to pop up a lot later, and Disintegration's unbelievably depressing mood made a pretty huge impression on me when I first heard it, ten years after its release.

1990:
I'll go with Skinny Puppy again. Too Dark Park actually does happen to be my favourite album of theirs.

1991:
There are albums that meant more to me that I could pick, but Nirvana's Nevermind is, to me, the quintessential Nineties album, and provided a pretty consistent soundtrack to my high school days.

1992:
Pretty much the last year that I had any trouble picking an album for. Nine Inch Nail's Broken is a great album. But not that great.

1993:
I wanted to pick Einsturzende Neubauten's Tabula Rasa, or Nirvana's In Utero for the sake of diversity, but who am I kidding? I love Tool's Undertow to pieces. Even if they far surpass it in many ways on later albums, it has a raw dirtiness that I still return to often.

1994:
This was a really fucking great year for music. Nirvana's MTV Unplugged, Jeff Buckley's Grace and Mayhem's De Mysteriius Dom Sathanas are all worthy candidates, but are all comfortably eclipsed by NIN's The Downward Spiral, an album which has all kinds of special significance to me, and which I've blathered on about in this blog many times before already.

1995:
The Smashing Pumpkin's Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness hasn't aged that well, but it was both ubiquitous and universally adored (see what I did there) for a good long time in the mid Nineties.

1996:
Nick Cave's Murder Ballads. Great album, although one I didn't come to until quite recently. I'm really only picking it so that I don't have every Tool album somewhere on this list.

1997:
Radiohead's Ok Computer. I didn't actually get this one until the next year, but its morbid paranoia made an unfortunately appropriate soundtrack to my last years of high school.

1998:
This is the point at which I can actually start doing this list properly, as it wasn't until this year that I became a real music geek. The soundtrack to this year for me was actually Ok Computer and Mellon Collie more than anything else, but Marilyn Manson's Mechanical Animals was a pretty constant companion too (honourable mention also goes to The Smashing Pumpkin's Adore and PJ Harvey's Is This Desire?). Can you tell that I was a miserable teenager that year?

1999:
A total no brainer. I must have listened to NIN's The Fragile at least three times a day for a year after it came out. I still remember skipping uni classes to go and buy it the day it came out. And hanging around in the record store for about an hour the day before because they were playing it on the PA.

2000:
A Perfect Circle - Mer de Noms. More fun memories associated with this album, such as coming home totally shitfaced from one of those fun Uni mid afternoon booze ups to find that my friend had left this album in my room for me. When I woke up the next morning I remembered nothing about what it sounded like, only that at the time I was listening to it I thought it was the most incredible thing I'd ever heard.

2001:
Tool – Lateralus. How could I pick anything else? Not just the soundtrack to that year, but to most of my life since...

2002:
I'm pretty sure we listened to Korn's Untouchables and System of a Down's Steal This Album a lot more, (and we definitely listened to Cripple Mr. Onion's album even more still, but it was a year or two old at the time) but Boards of Canada's Geogaddi always brings to mind all the times we sat in the sun chilling out and drinking Summer Ale. It felt like we did that a lot back then, even though it was barely ever sunny in Christchurch, and I was hell busy with my final year of Uni.

2003:
Massive Attack's 100th Window would probably do as well, but Radiohead's Hail to the Thief lived in our kitchen stereo for most of the year and got played probably twice a day at least (once by Barnes, once by me). It must have driven our other flatmates nuts.

2004:
There were many far better albums released this year (Nick Cave's Lyre of Orpheus, Dillinger Escape Plan's Miss Machine and Isis' Panopticon come instantly to mind), but Velvet Revolver's Contraband got a hell of a lot of playtime from me this year, and is fairly strongly associated with an old girlfriend as well. I sure wish I could pick a better album for this year, but this is the actual honest choice.

2005:
I blame Meshuggah's Catch 33 (along with Miss Machine and Panopticon, but they came out the year before) for turning me from a relatively middle of the road hard rocker into an unredeemable metal troglodyte. Damn you brutally heavy, technical music!

2006:
This was the year I moved to Australia, and Tool's 10,000 Days was the soundtrack to the three months of pissing around it took me to get here. Few albums are as strongly associated with specific times as this one is for me.

2007:
I'm a bit torn here. Musically I think of this as the year I got turned on to Nightwish, so I could list Dark Passion Play, but the truth is I like Once a hell of a lot more, and even if the music didn't do quite as much for me Nine Inch Nail's Year Zero is the obvious choice, both for the innovative way that Trent Reznor used the internet as his liner notes, and for how the album concept reflected world events of the last five years so well.

2008:
Opeth – Watershed. See my post of a few weeks back. This album still fucking rocks!

Unthemed Weekly Music Roundup

So I've listened to a whole bunch of shit this week, and all of it seems worth commenting on, even if none of it really grabbed me enough in a good or bad way to write a full post about.

Ambient Noise Madness:
Black Boned Angel – Bliss And Void Inseparable
Vargr – Northern Black Supremacy

This week I also became reacquainted with Black Boned Angel, who I'd heard before and really liked but never acquired until now. Black Boned Angel is a solo project of one Campbell Kneale, a Wellingtonian, who also records as Birchfield Cat Motel. In the Black Boned Angel incarnation his music is dark, avant-garde ambient, a genre that I used to love but which I have neglected in recent years. Bliss And Void Inseparable is an hour long piece that lurches unnaturally from one moody, disturbing piece of creepy noise to another, and if you're into that sort of thing it's pretty good.

I stumbled across Bliss and Void Inseparable while purchasing Vargr's Nothern Black Supremacy, which bridges the gap between my old and new listening habits by taking ambient industrial and infusing it with a gritty dose of black metal. They do so by taking the BM genre trappings, gurgled vocals, tremolo guitar riffs and blast beat drums and cranking up the murkiness of the production, reducing it all into a distorted wash that blends in perfectly as a backdrop to the industrial noise. The two genre's really do make a surprisingly good match, not just because the sounds mould together so well, but also because they share a few aesthetic and philosophical principles, such as their charming fascination with fascist imagery.

1001 Albums:
The Beatles – A Hard Day's Night
Jacques Brel – Olympia 64

I quite liked With the Beatles which I listened to a month or so back. The songs were nothing special but they performed with a youthful vigour that surpassed any other similar album I've reached on this list so far and introduced the rawness and energy that characterises rock and roll in my mind and is lacking from the likes of say the Everly Brothers. A Hard Day's Night in comparison was a little bit of a disappointment. Perhaps it's just because I've been exposed to these songs literally since the day I was born, as an inescapable part of the pop cultural atmosphere, but the whole album just breezed right past my ears and left little impression.

Jacques Brel on the other hand is a total revelation. I've never heard of him before but in his native France (well, actually he's Belgian, but his musical career was based in France) he is considered an influential singer songwriter. I'm at a real loss as to how to describe his music. It certainly fits into no category I can think of, although iTunes has classified it as 'caberet', and that's as good a guess as any. Brel sings accompanied by a sprightly orchestra which includes plenty of accordion and piany (as opposed to piano!), giving it an definite French character. I guess superficially you might compare this album to those of Frank Sinatra, in that it's a single male vocalist backed by an orchestra which acts in a purely supporting role, but Brel's vocal quirks and dramatic, bitter delivery put me in mind of Mike Patton more than anyone. Brel is clearly a big influence on Patton, at least when he's in crooning mode. And I almost forgot to mention, this album is really good! I love it even though Brel's best quality is supposedly his lyrics and I can't understand a word of it, as it's all in French.

One other random chain of influence. British singer songwriter Scott Walker was heavily influenced by Brel, covering him often. Walker's 2006 album The Drift is one of the albums Mikael Akerfeldt has been citing as an influence on the latest Opeth album. Coming from such a far flung corner of the musical map I'm totally surprised (but also delighted) by just how relevant this guy is to the obscure corners of metaldom.

Sigur Rós - Með Suð Í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust

Sigur Rós are one of the few upbeat, happy bands to make serious inroads into my music collection, which in general resembles a grim nightmare world of hatred, despair and violence. I was a little disappointed with their b-sides album Hvarf/Heim that was released last year, but didn't think too much of it since their last two real albums (() and Takk) were so damn good. Sadly their new album with the nonstandard character filled title too long for me to be bothered typing out again disappoints in a similar way to Hvarf/Heim. At first I wondered (as I often do) if perhaps I haven't stuck my head so far out into the world of extreme metal that I've lost the ability to appreciate music without blast beats, vocals howled by a madman and lyrics about strangling people with their own intestines, so I made a point of listening to Ágætis Byrjun, one of their earlier albums, again and found that I still thought it rocked. By this highly scientific method I have proved that it is indeed Sigur Rós that have started to suck, not me.

Upon consideration I've decided that the thing that's changed about them is that their older albums had more flavour to their emotional landscape. While their main angle has always been prettiness, twinkling piano and uplift, on earlier albums it was leavened with moments of melancholy (and on () even heaviness) but they seem to have discarded these shades of subtlety in recent years. On this release the climactic, soaring conclusion to 'Ára bátur' (backed by the London Oratory School Choir) would on an earlier album have been the triumphant, redemptive centrepiece of an emotional journey that visited a variety of moods, but in this case is just the point where they crank things up from 'really really happy' to 'super extra fucking happy'.

On the other hand these guys are touring here next month, and I am still looking forward to it.

Towards Ragnarok

Burzum – Dauði Baldrs

And with Dauði Baldrs we have finally made it through the entire Burzum catalogue to date. This record is the second to last that Varg released, and the first one he made in prison. The melodies are of the same stock as those from Burzum's older black metal albums but due to production concerns (the only instrument Varg is allowed in prison is a synthesiser) this album is entirely devoid of drums and guitars.

Dauði Baldrs is less ambient and minimal than it's successor Hliðskjálf; indeed the songs are straight up black metal performed sans vocals and with different instrumentation (one track is even melodically a straight up copy of an earlier black metal styled song), but I can't avoid making the same comparison as I did when I listened to the latter album - that this stuff sounds a hell of a lot like Coil. The chiming bells and spacey strings of 'Hermoðr Á Helferð' sound almost exactly like those on Coil's 'Titan Arch'. Burzum's interest in the occult is another similarity shared with those post industrial hedonists, and where the earlier black metal albums evoked the dark, gothic northern European wilderness, Dauði Baldrs has more of an abstract, mystical mood.

The songs suffer a little from the lack of vocals. Without them a standard black metal song is too simple and repetitive, and stripping away the distortion and feralness and replacing it with synth strings and horns only emphasises the fact that, for all his originality in developing the style of black metal, Varg's songs aren't actually that interesting in and of themselves.

It's been interesting to see how he influenced and in fact set a standard for the genre but other than Filosofem I don't think I'll be revisiting this music all that much. After all, even I feel a little bit uncomfortable listening to the work of a murderous neo-nazi.

Children of the Cave

Finntroll – Nattfodd

If you've ever heard the term 'polka metal' before, you probably thought it was a joke. Well I am pleased to inform you that Nattfodd proves that it is very real indeed. The genre of folk metal combines black metal with traditional music of the band's country of origin (or at least that of a country they think is really cool) and in Finntroll's case this is traditional Finnish polka, which is not dissimilar to the kind of oompah music you might hear in a German beer hall.

Now you're forgiven if you think that this sounds like a totally retarded idea, but give it a chance because I assure you that it's actually pretty fucking awesome and there is more to Finntroll than just this goofy gimmick. The only reason that it works at all is because the band are skilled songwriters and they wring a lot of variety and musical ideas from the starting point of the two vastly dissimilar genres and also by including ambient and acoustic interludes.

Where most black metal is laden with a mood of doom and despair, Finntroll's take is more upbeat so that when the evil sounding tremolo strumming morphs into a happy polka lick and is joined by a perky accordian and horns it fits naturally, and in fact the whole album is loads of fun to listen to and is dare I say it even joyous, an adjective that is almost inconceivable to apply to black metal.

While black metal traditionally deals with themes of evil and the occult, Finntroll's lyrics are occupied with far more accessible subjects, such as being a troll, living in the forest and drinking lots of beer. In fact their innocent, cheerful celebration of nature and the simple life is a nice counterpoint to say Burzum's morbid evocation of the Scandinavian wilderness as the grim, frostbitten, 'whites only' abode of Satan.

Get past the ridiculous concept and you'll find that this album is great fun. It's definitely what I'd have playing in my beer hall!

Here's the unnecessarily slo-moed video for 'Trollhammaren':

To Die In Battle Divine

Black Dahlia Murder – Nocturnal

Other than my intentional forays into the music of the genre's seminal instigators, I don't think I've listened to a straight up black metal album for quite some time. As with other genres that espouse a deliberately simplified, stripped back form (punk, industrial) the practitioners eventually got bored and expanded or merged their music with other styles. Every black metal album I've heard of recent years is prefixed or suffixed by a qualifier: ambient black metal, blackened thrash, polka metal and so on.

The Black Dahlia Murder's take on the genre is different again. While the drumming and vocals are clearly black metal through and through and the visual aesthetic of the band is also a fit, the production is so clean and slick that Euronymous probably stirred restlessly in his grim, frostbitten grave when Nocturnal went gold (well, more so than usual anyway) and the catchy, melodic guitar hooks are more the kind of thing you'd find in a heavy thrash band (I'm put in mind of Arch Enemy), than the minimal droning riffs of Burzum. And maybe it's just their hair cuts, but somehow I keep getting a bit of an emo vibe from these guys.

Nevertheless if you're not too much of a purist the result is some damn good ear candy. Can you ask any more from a metal album than brutally heavy rhythms, diabolically wild guitar solos and literate but sociopathic lyrics screamed by someone sounding like a demoniac? The Black Dahlia Murder are a perfect example of good pop-metal; the production is high quality and the songs are as catchy and accessible as anything Jack Johnson ever wrote (but with all those boring fifths nice and flattened!) yet the melodies, aesthetic and energy are all genuinely evil. It's good fun stuff and I'm a bit annoyed that I missed my chance to see them play last month while I was overseas (damn you for ruining my holiday Dillinger Escape Plan and Meshuggah!)

Here's 'What A Horrible Night To Have A Curse' from Nocturnal:

Random Metal Article of the Day

An article about Californian black metal band Wolves in the Throne Room at Slate. I like to see semi-obscure, interesting bands like this profiled in the mainstream media.

And yes, they are a pretty awesome band. I haven't gotten around to getting their album yet, on account of the options for doing so being slim. In this age of digital downloads mail order feels like a waste of time, and I haven't seen their stuff in the local stores either. I should have spent more time in music stores while I was overseas...

Ha!

Today's random funny news post has nothing to do with animals or India.

A Norwegian politician advocates legalising illicit music downloads. Enslaved reply by stealing his sheep.

In trve black metal fashion they released the sheep to freedom in the mountains, where it can now forever roam twixt the blackened peaks bathed in the dark light of the frostbitten wintermoon, preserving the spirit of metal within its black unbeating heart.

In Every Night There Is A Different Black

Burzum - Filosofem

Filosofem is Burzum's most highly regarded album, and it also happens to be the first Burzum album that I've genuinely enjoyed.

It's not actually much different from his earlier albums. Varg is the king of trve black metal and this is one of the albums that define the genre. The production on every instrument is tuned to produce the ghastliest sound possible; the guitars are a wall of lo-fi distortion that borders on static, only just coherent enough to give definition to the tritone heavy leads that propel the music. Varg's vocals are, as usual, whispered in an unholy gurgle. You don't need the Norwegian legal system to tell you that this guy's fucking crazy. Insane drumming is perhaps one of the only defining characteristics of black metal that Burzum does not usually feature but on 'Jesus' Tod' (track two on this album), Varg records some of the most impressive drums to be found in Burzum's discography. It merely consists of a single simple figure repeated throughout the song, but it's a fucking mean one and it's full of driving energy.

The low point of the album is the obligatory ambient track 'Tour Around the Transcendental Pillar of Singularity', which is just as wanky as the title leads one to expect. It's actually a decent song, but runs for twenty five long minutes with little development to justify such a long running time. I'm sure it's intended to be meditative, but I don't listen to black metal to achieve inner peace.

None of this is at all dissimilar to any of Burzum's three earlier releases. The reason that I find this one so much more engaging than the others is probably because of it's cohesive and well expressed sense of mood. The cover art sets the tone, a woman blows a traditional fluted instrument against the backdrop of a lonely Scandinavian forest, and the music paints a complementary picture. It's hard to explain but despite the evil tone of the music (and the evil person who made it) Filosofem evokes not so much imagery of violence but more the beauty and mystery of the natural and supernatural worlds. It may have been made with the latest in heavy metal production technology but this album feels like it is invoking something very old.

Such a feeling can be appreciated as a unique insight into the mind of a very disturbing person, but if you can divorce your understanding of the music from the person who made it, Filosofem's weird beauty stands pretty well on it's own.

Black Throne

Burzum – Det Som Engang Var

There's not a lot to say about Burzum's second album that I haven't already said about their first and third. Sludgy guitars knocking out diminished fifth happy riffs and drums that sound like they were recorded in a goblin filled cavern provide the backdrop for screechy lead guitars reciting slowed down, cheesy Scandanavian metal melodies and Varg's ghastly (and I mean that in a positive way) gurgles and growls.

It's worth noting again that the production is excellent. Black metal is supposed to be stripped down and raw, almost to the point of indecipherability, but unlike many bands who slip right past that point of good taste Varg knows just how grungy to make it sound without compromising the melody and rhythm of the music for the sake of texture. It's even more impressive that (he claims) he recorded it himself in less than a day.

It is a cool aesthetic and when Varg finds a good riff or interesting song idea to hang it on it works really well, but less than half the tracks out of this album's eight songs fulfil this promise. One of my favourites is the opening track 'Den Onde Krysten' ('The Evil Shores') which is a nice scrapey, droney ambient industrial track which is a good fit to the work of Coil or Jordan Reyne (in fact, I'm sure I've heard the backing synth line sampled on an industrial album somewhere...). It's a pity he doesn't do more of this kind of thing because in my opinion he's much better at it than straight up black metal.

I also quite like 'En Ring Til Aa Herske' ('One Ring To Rule'), which combines the usual black metal conventions with a sorrowful backing chant as a nice counterpoint to Varg's usual howling. This song's title is far from the only embarassing fantasy reference to be found here. According to Wikipedia Det Som Engang Var's cover was inspired by the old Dungeons and Dragons module The Temple of Elemental Evil. NEEEEEEEEEEEEEERD!

Mediocre Music In Brief

Listed in ascending order of shittiness.

Lamb of God – Ashes of the Wake

Ashes of the Wake is Lamb of God's most recent album before the mainstream breakthrough Sacrament. It's a perfectly decent record but I have absolutely nothing to say about it. The riffs are rhythmically complex and very catchy (and are a lot more metal than Sacrament) and it's delivered with respectable technical precision by all members of the band, but after I'm finished listening to it I'm just left with an underwhelming feeling of 'Meh. It was OK'.

Burzum – Hvis Lyset Tar Oss

My Burzum listening schedule is still fairly haywire. I've skipped one of the older ones, meaning that this is the third album, and therefore one of the mid-period classics. However I'm still not that impressed. For the first half an hour it's a total bore, retreading the same old stripped down riffs, ghastly vocals (his voice cracks like a school boy at one point during 'Inn i slottet fra drømmen') and grungy production that I found endearing but ultimately lacking substance on the first Burzum album.

Having said that I do really like the fifteen minute ambient closing track 'Tomhet' (Emptiness), which makes me hold off a little before judging this guy to be the most overrated musician this side of The Edge.

Fats Domino – This is Fats
1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die Number 5

Like the last album in this series, Louis Prima's The Wildest, this is a soft jazz album, but while I found a lot about The Wildest to enjoy, This is Fats was just a total bore. It's completely gutless with no swing or bite. Some of the later songs perked up my ears a little but by and large this is a dull affair.

Next up, Duke Ellington. My expectations are high.

The Blinding Light – The Glass Bullet EP

This came into my collection along with Converge's Jane Doe and Old Man Gloom's Christmas so I was half expecting yet another major musical revelation. These guys play fast, intense hardcore very much in the vein of Converge, and with a hint of Dillinger Escape Plan's rhythmic insanity. But despite being so similar to bands that I love, for some reason this EP does absolutely nothing for me. I'm at a loss to explain why, since it contains so many elements that have been proven to light my aesthetic fire in a big way, but even with a mere twenty minute running time I found the whole disc to be a serious chore to sit through.

On the Blood Red Snowy Ground

Burzum – Burzum/Aske

You may recall that some time ago I wrote about Burzum's most recent album Hildskalf (insert your own arbitrary germanic character accents). Burzum is the work of the infamous Varg Vikarnes, considered the godfather of black metal mainly for being one of the first to define the genre's current sound (even though he considers most of the current practitioners to be posers and sellouts) but also for walking the walk in regards to the antisocial behaviour expected of a trve black metaller (i.e. the church burning, the satanism/paganism, the murder, the neo-Nazism and so on).

As it happens Hildskalf was not in any way a black metal album so I went back to his first release (actually his first two EPs concatenated onto a single album) which is more or less a textbook example of the genre. Probably because these early Burzum albums are the textbooks which later black metallers composed by.

Seminal as this album may be, it's not much more than an average listen. Varg's vocals are impressive, being one of the few examples I've heard of the standard black metal howl/gurgle that doesn't sound stupid, and the music, which is so stripped back as to be almost punk in some ways, is agreeable but in no way inspiring enough to justify this guy's inflated reputation. However there are a couple of ambient/industrial tracks included which I quite liked (especially 'Dungeons of Darkness', rattley, scrapey goodness!). I suspect that this album and Hildskalf are not his best works so I shall continue on with the other albums.

Varg claims to have recorded the whole thing in seventeen hours and played all the instruments himself (save for a guest guitar solo on 'War' by, you guessed it, Euronymous, the dude Varg is currently in jail for killing). That's quite impressive (If it's true that is. It must be borne in mind that this comes from the guy who says things like “I'm not a Nazi because I don't believe in 'national socialism'” and “I was framed for the murder! The police said that they found my fingerprints on the knife, but I wore gloves when I killed him!”) and even I, lover of over produced technical death metal, have respect for the purism of his back to basics, one take (mistakes and all) approach, and the fact that he made such a professional sounding album even within those constraints.

There Was A Great Earthquake, And The Sun Became Black

Satyricon – Nemesis Divina

One last Satyricon album before I put them out of mind forever. Nemesis Divina is probably the most enjoyable out of the three albums of theirs I've been listening to. Faint praise but praise nonetheless. Nemesis Divina does not differ in style much at all from their earlier albums but it is a bit more professional in terms of both production and has some catchiness and life to it, capturing a sliver of Emperor-esque awesomeness. It also contains theit most popular song, 'Mother North', and my personal favourite Satyricon track 'Du Som Hater Gud', which gets the award because of it's brilliantly cheesy piano outro.


The album as a whole is still not terribly exciting however. Ideally you should listen to Emperor or even better Mayhem but if I were stuck on a desert island with only one black metal album and it was Nemesis Divina, I'd at least be glad it wasn't one of their other albums or god forbid, Cradle of Filth.

Boring Friday Night Metal Link

A moderately interesting article on black metal at the Chicago Tribune. I hate flat hunting.

Incomprehensible Screaming

Satyricon/Enslaved – The Forest is My Throne / Yggdrassil

It's time for another Satyricon album. This one is a split EP so Satyricon only have four songs on it, and there's not really much to say about them that I didn't say about Dark Medieval Times. Save for a nice acoustic moment in 'Min Hyllest Til Vinterland', and the cool pleasure/pain moaning during the intro to 'Night of the Triumphator', it's inoffensive but boring.

Enslaved's stuff is a lot better. They have more of the intensity and energy that characterises decent black metal and it's a lot more fun to listen to, even if from a purely technical perspective there's little to differentiate them from Satyricon or Emperor. Unfortunately they're let down by some atrocious production. I know black metal is supposed to have shitty production, but there's a big difference between shitty as in 'giving things a raw, primal feel' and shitty as in 'barely being able to discern the drums because it sounds like they were recorded from a mike embedded in the producers rectum'. In spite of that they've still managed to make a fun EP.

In the Shadow of Deepest Darkness

Satyricon - Dark Medieval Times

Yes I realise I bagged these guys fairly hard for their shitty concert last year, but I figure I'll still write up their albums, as the ones I've listened to were at least passable enough to convince me to go see them live.

Dark Medieval Times is their first album and is probably their best. This is of course a relative judgement; Satyricon's best is still pretty average by most standards. There's nothing on this album that Emperor haven't done better, and there's almost nothing that makes them memorable or stand out from other black metal bands.

The one gimmick that is uniquely theirs are these cheesy medieval folk instrumental interludes featuring flutes and harpsichord style keys, which are just that, a gimmick. They're kind of funny the first time you hear them, but I doubt that it is intentional humour. I will admit that there are a couple of good points about this album. The album divider 'Min Hyllest Til Vinterland' (My Tribute to the Winterland) is a very nice acoustic guitar interlude, and at one or two other points on the album they actually do manage to legitimately rock out, so the album is saved from complete mediocrity. And if that sounds like damning with faint praise, well that's exactly what these guys deserve. Take the balls out of black metal and you're left with mostly just spooky photography and bad production.

I Am... The EMPEROR!!

Emperor – Anthems To The Welkin At Dusk

My little overview of black metal has been continuing apace over the holidays. We now come to one of the most iconic bands in the genre, Emperor. Yes they're Norwegian, but I believe it is up for debate as to whether they're trve or not.

Anyone who's curious about this kind of music should definitely start with Anthems To The Welkin At Dusk, as these guys seem to be the black metal band most easily enjoyed by people who don't like black metal and this is probably their most well regarded album. Indeed it is very accessible when compared to other bands of a similar style. Despite containing all the standard trappings of the genre (low-fi production, raspy vocals and spooky keyboards) it has some pretty solid and catchy songwriting which is still eminently enjoyable even when buried under a layer of fuzz. Compared to their contemporaries these guys have a far more epic sound, they're more about majestic satanic ritual whereas Mayhem and Burzum are more about grim frostbitten moors under moonlight.

Like those other bands these guys have had band members incarcerated for murder and arson but musically they don't compare to Mayhem for manic intensity, and in fact they seem to be deliberately aiming for a more commercial sound. While they're more sophisticated and have one or two great melodic moments on this album (for the record the tracks in question are 'The Oath' and 'With Strength I Burn') I'd still prefer to listen to Mayhem. Nevertheless I'd recommend these guys as the church burning, queer bashing murderers you can play for your Mum.