Thantifaxath are a new black metal band out of Toronto. They released their debut ep this year in cassette format on Dark Descent Records, and I think you will like it.
10,000 Years of Failure / Violently Expanding Nothing
The amount of diversity they’ve managed to cram into a five and a half minute long song (excluding the introduction here merged) is pretty amazing. The track, and most of the ep really, isn’t so much moody as thematic. It’s got a sort of sci-fi horror vibe throughout, apparent right from the bass riff introduction, and the ample mingling of melody in between epic black metal explosions almost gives the song a plot line. Even the choice of album cover, Nicéphore Niépce’s La cour du domaine du Gras (supposedly the first photograph ever taken), resembles something of an extra-terrestrial sighting. If the track title is any indication, this was likely their intent, and they pull it off well. Outer space and black metal are an uncommon mix, and one usually attempted through an emphasis on slow-moving, vast atmospherics. Violently Expanding Nothing (the youtube label “Violently Expanding Emptiness” is wrong; I’m taking the track title from the actual packaging) is, in contrast, gritty and abrasive, and all the more effective because of it.
Freedom is Depression
Thantifaxath definitely lay down their best card first, but the album’s other two tracks (both under five minutes long) carry much of the same appeal. Freedom is Depression, peculiar title aside, continues to give me that sort of b-side horror flick vibe, especially with its low production atmospheric guitars. The main riff following the introduction calls to mind recent Enslaved, and that might be the only clear comparison I can make of this album to anything else in particular. It’s among the most unique black metal I’ve heard in a while, and it makes excellent use of relatively low production value to create an eery, unearthly vibe.
Keep an eye out for these guys. They’re brand new, and I suspect their best is yet to come.
Here it is five days into October and I haven’t covered a black metal album yet. I ought to be ashamed. Allow me to belatedly kick off my favorite season in good proper satan-worshiping style.
Serpent Soul
Craft’s new album kicks ass. I might go on long analytic rants right and left about modern black metal hybrid bands standing at the forefront of innovative new metal today, but when it comes time to dig out the really sinister shit, tradition still carries the flag. Craft have spent the last ten years proving that corpse paint and spiked bracers still have a legitimate roll in black metal.
Void starts out by punching you in the nuts, then Mikael Nox gets about an inch from your face and compliments your tears with spittle while John Doe plants his foot on your chest and breaks out the tremolo. By the two minute mark they’ve finished chalking a pentagram around you and the ritual begins. If this transition strikes you initially as a disappointment, leaving the opening brutality behind too soon, just give it some time. As the three minute mark approaches, the tremolo guitar invokes a brief vision of awe and terror, soon to be lost in a chaotic haze. If you haven’t moved by now, you’ll probably find your intestines dangling from the ceiling beams.
The only real disappointment in the entire song is the fact that it ends.
The Ground Surrenders
It’s not that Serpent Soul, or any other track on the album for that matter, is aesthetically above standard. As song writers they follow the black metal status quo, and if you don’t like this genre of music they’re not the sort of band you’re likely to make an exception for. Rather, what makes Void as a whole so great is all in the details of delivery. The vocals, guitars, and drums all merge perfectly to create a single solid sound in which nothing seems out of place. It’s all so tight that every dynamic shift delivers; the impact never falls short of their intentions.
Succumb to Sin
Granted plenty of black metal bands have preferred moderate tempos, it’s one of Craft’s great consistencies on Void to always take maximum advantage of the sort of heaviness a slow and steady plod can offer. It’s almost as if the tension of each track is measured, with the opening brutality as the measuring stick. Any time it cuts back you’re practically guaranteed a return. Whatever’s built up is always properly released, whether it be in the form of the explosion at the end of The Ground Surrenders or through the more subtle bursts employed on Succumb to Sin. Add a quick guitar solo at the end to let out the leftovers, and here you’ve got an exceptionally well-formed song.
I’ve talked this album up quite a lot, but let me be clear as to why. It’s not great in any of the ways I usually get fired up about; it’s pretty plain and simple black metal. Like Total Soul Rape and Terror Propaganda (I never actually knew Fuck the Universe existed until I started writing this), it will probably be a fall staple for me when I’m itching for good black metal with no trappings, but the only thing I’m really going to remember is that I liked it. I’ll forget the intricacies of the songs that I’ve picked up on while writing this pretty quickly. But what really struck me when I paid attention to it (and what might subconsciously continue to draw me to their first two albums) is not ingenuity but the quality of their musicianship. This album shines because every member of the band does the right things at the right times every time, feeding off of each other’s performance to create a really tight, unified sound. It’s just really well crafted music, no pun intended.
Dave King, the frontman to Flogging Molly, is going to turn 50 in two months, and the band’s debut studio album is barely a decade old. King has a long musical history pre-dating Swagger, playing in various bands that included former members of Motörhead and Krokus, and he was actively involved in writing and performing Irish folk music by at least 1993. So while Speed of Darkness might only be the band’s fifth studio album, spanning only six years, it’s something of a late career effort.
Float disappointed me. It had nothing of the immediate appeal of Swagger, Drunken Lullabies, or Within a Mile of Home. Though the music and lyrics might have been appealing after a few reflective listens, I never felt compelled to put in the effort. What I liked most about the band was missing and I frankly didn’t have the time in 2008 to dig deeper. The thought immediately came to me that their first three albums had been the product of a lifetime of creative creations that had simply not been fully developed into recorded songs, and that on Float, in contrast, for the first time Flogging Molly had to produce new material from scratch. Given King’s age, perhaps the four years between Within a Mile of Home and Float just weren’t sufficient to really develop something noteworthy.
But again, 2008 was an off year for me in general. Speed of Darkness I am at more liberty to assess.
Speed of Darkness
What I noticed immediately was a more explosive sound. The opening song kicks off with a sort of energy that I never picked up on passively listening to Float. It definitely grabbed my attention. But while a part of me was excited by this return, the actual content of the song had me worried. It seemed a bit too heavy for its own good. That the song is meant to be a little more dark than usual might be implied by its title, but really, what Irish folk song isn’t dark? In a style so permeated by a morbid sense of humor, the song’s serious tone just felt shallow. The folk takes second stage to the punk/hard rock, and the sort of anger King expresses is neither particularly poignant nor encased in music sufficiently care-free to drive its point home.
It lacked the means by which Irish folk conveys such a heightened feeling of sincerity. I didn’t feel like whatever King had to say got through. This sort of shallowness, not of thought necessarily, but at least of its conveyance, would be my watchword for the rest of the album.
Revolution
I didn’t have to look far. Revolution probably wasn’t the best choice of songs to follow up Speed of Darkness, because it only served to confirm my suspicions. The whole power to the proletariat theme permeating the album is presented so narrowly that it seems a century distant from reality, never mind that the issues they wish to confront are quite active. This song attempts to tap into sentiments that may have stood strong in the industrial age, but I question whether their target audience, in spite of being able to relate to the problems King addresses, really view their hardships in terms of a simple class struggle. Americans aren’t starving in the streets of Detroit, reading Marx, and forming up political discussion groups. Times are tough, but the issues manifest elsewhere, and “I lost my job, it’s time for a revolution,” is an absurdly shallow (if anything counterrevolutionary) solution to modern concerns.
I’m not picking sides or calling Flogging Molly out on anything, I’m just saying that the lyrical theme which appears on Revolution and continues to surface throughout the album isn’t nearly so inspiring as they would like it to be, and as, given another year of brainstorming before entering the studio, I think they could have made it.
Hand in hand, the music is a bore.
The Power’s Out
But my negative remarks take precedence only because their previous albums were so good and because they seem to be trying so hard. Speed of Darkness is not a dead weight; it’s a mish-mash. That initial impression on the opening song–that feeling that something of their old energy was back–was not a complete illusion. The Power’s Out is at least one song entirely on par with their old material. The sort of shallowness I sense in the album’s overarching message is entirely forgiven when given to lyrics and music that are effectively moving. What I hear in this song that Speed of Darkness and Revolution lack is earnest conviction. This is the sort of song where you can feel King’s passion. He’s speaking from the heart, not just regurgitating rhetoric, and the whole band seems to feed off of it. The lines are better composed, the music better written, the delivery more convincing… There’s a central spark igniting their real talent.
A Prayer for Me in Silence
And while I think it safe to call Speed of Darkness their most rock-oriented album to date, snubbing the folk side of their sound far more than I would have liked, there are a number of nice little acoustic numbers filling the gaps that serve well to warm an otherwise bleak collection of songs.
Speed of Darkness is one of those textbook average albums. It’s never “bad” but frequently bores, pays ample homage to the generic, struggles lyrically to live up to its own standards, but does occasionally break into something above the bar. As I said, Dave King is about to turn 50, and to call it a disappointment would overlook the fact that he has a long, successful career behind him. It can be hard to accept this, given that they’ve only released five albums, but in context it’s perhaps unfair to even compare this to the likes of Swagger. I mean no one says of a new Iron Maiden album “It’s got nothing on Number of the Beast,” or refuses to enjoy it on those grounds. There comes a certain point in an artist’s career where average becomes appreciable, and you have to respect him for at least trying to keep it real.
But this is a band, not a one-man project, and furthermore I have no insight into King’s state of mind. If he still feels like his musical peak has yet to come and he has something to prove, and the rest of the band is with him, then I challenge him to do better. If they’re just out there having fun and aren’t trying to surpass their finer hours, then Speed of Darkness is a respectable work. Just nothing special.
I just found out that Jaakko Hittavainen Lemmetty left Korpiklaani last month. According to the band’s official statement, “his personal health issues made the constant touring and recording impossible.” That might come as no surprise, considering Korpiklaani are one of the most prolific bands on the market. During his tenure they managed to release seven albums in nine years, and in 2010 alone they performed live approximately 100 times. I know I certainly wouldn’t be able to keep up.
His departure lends a sort of heightened significance to Ukon Wacka. Hittavainen might not have been their frontman, but he was responsible for all violins and woodwinds on all seven albums. In other words, half of what really made Korpiklaani folk metal is gone, and however well his replacement, Teemu Eerola, fills the void, their next album is bound to be different. Ukon Wacka might be the last of its kind.
Change is a pretty foreign concept to Korpiklaani, both in their sound and in their line-up. That is a point I’ve always appreciated about them. If it’s not broke, why fix it?
Louhen Yhdeksäs Poika
Ukon Wacka is no different. As always, the album makes no attempt at an introduction. It just kicks off from the get-go as quintessential Korpiklaani. Jonne Järvelä goes on rolling out incomprehensible lines at a break neck pace to a constant melody of accordion and violin, brought to life by standard metal instrumentation that’s designed to accent the folk, not compete with it. Throw in an awesome violin solo towards the end, and you’ve got a song that’s entirely unique to the band and entirely to form with everything else they’ve written. The stylistic monotony is hardly a fault, what with nearly all of their 80+ songs accomplishing a distinct and addictive melody. I probably get more Korpiklaani songs stuck in my head than any other band out there; I just might be at a loss to put a name or album to them.
Tequila
One of many long-standing traditions Ukon Wacka upholds is the booze track. Not that every song isn’t designed for copious consumption, there’s always been at least one song that requires no knowledge of Finnish to convey its lyrics. With Wooden Pints on Spirit of the Forest, Beer Beer on Voice of Wilderness, Happy Little Boozer on Tales Along This Road, Let’s Drink on Tervaskanto, Vodka on Karkelo, and now Tequila, Korven Kuningas remains the only album that doesn’t really fit that mold. And like all of those others, Tequila stands out as one of the album’s most memorable songs.
Surma
When it comes to closing songs, the band has been a little more diverse in their selection. But, aside from on Tales Along This Road, they’ve always seemed to save their most reflective or otherwise inspiring song for the end. Surma might not match Karkelo’s Kohmelo or Tervaskanto’s Nordic Feast, but it’s certainly the high point of Ukon Wacka as far as I’m concerned.
There’s not much I can say about the album really, because it sounds just like all of their others. I suppose Korpiklaani might be regarded as a bit shallow, at least in so far as most of their songs, especially in the absence of any understanding of the predominantly Finnish lyrics, are just fun and fairly thoughtless numbers about partying and getting drunk. But there’s also a sort of authenticity to that which renders them significantly more enduring than comparable acts like Finntroll. While I don’t think any particular Korpiklaani album holds a candle to Nattfödd or even Nifelvind, in the long run I always end up listening to them more. A lot of folk bands that don’t take themselves very seriously can only really be appreciated in their own right. Korpiklaani, on the other hand, extend beyond themselves, presenting a sort of continuity. I can’t really speak of them imitating or incorporating Finnish folk because, much like Irish punk and metal bands, they’re more the modern continuation of a long-standing tradition than an attempt to resuscitate it. I’ve never seen them live (they’re about to kick off a North American tour with Arkona that I might give in to a five hour drive across the state for), but I imagine their show incites a lot more dancing than headbanging, if you know what I mean. Authentic folk really implies community participation, and that’s the sort of thing Korpiklaani cater to, on Ukon Wacka as strongly as on anything else.
It’s been about a month now since I first acquired a copy of Heritage. I rather wish I’d reviewed it sooner, since my opinions ultimately never really changed. I really liked it on my first listen, and I like it to about the same extent, or perhaps slightly more, for about the same reasons now. Its reception hasn’t really changed either. Labeled pretty much from the start as Opeth’s worst album to date, it continues to wrack up impressively low scores across the board. (The average Encyclopaedia Metallum review is 54%, where no other Opeth album has failed to break at least 75%.) Either popular opinion has placed my presumed disposition towards good taste in dire jeopardy, or else I’m just approaching this from a wildly different perspective than the average listener. I am inclined to believe the latter.
Unfortunately, I cannot treat this as a normal Through the Shattered Lens review. That is, I cannot showcase particular songs via youtube and describe which elements really stand out to me for better and for worse. The band has been pretty forceful lately about preventing any and all means to experience their studio albums without first paying them. I’ll spare you a rant on antiquated copyright laws and record label monopolies, but suffice to say a musician’s attitude towards listeners will always be reflected in some capacity in the music. Whether Akerfeldt (signing to a notorious record label is no excuse) is too selfish or simply too oblivious to respect the means by which he became a celebrity in the first place, there is an over-inflated ego at work here.
But that wasn’t news to me. Really it shouldn’t be news to anyone who’s listened to Roundhouse Tapes and endured the six minutes of dialogue wrapping up the live version of Blackwater Park. (It’s always lame and cliche to mock-hype yourself up to be a celebrity, but it ceases to be tongue in cheek when you really are a celebrity.) At any rate I started losing interest when they released Deliverance, and by Ghost Reveries they were one of those “I really respect them, I just can’t get into their new sound” bands.
So I guess the first big difference between me and, well, pretty much everybody else, was my only thinly-veiled conviction that Opeth were no longer very good. I had absolutely zero expectations, so any mediocrity apparent in Heritage burst no bubbles for me. Rather, it being immediately clear that Heritage was not the sort of album I expected to hear, I ended up listening to it almost as though they were a brand new band. As such, I really can’t find fault in it. Sure, it’s not groundbreaking. It’s unlikely (though not out of the realm of possibility) that it will make my top 10 of the year charts when all is said and done. But damnit, this is a fun, creative, thoroughly entertaining album, and under any other band name I think it would earn fairly positive reviews. Unfortunately, urging people to listen to it with an “open mind” would be pointless, because it’s Opeth. There is no getting around its place in history. If you really liked Watershed it’s unlikely you will enjoy it.
If I could sample the songs here like usual I would treat this whole article differently. I would completely ignore the fact that it’s Opeth, point out all of my favorite bits and pieces, maybe make passing references to the cheesy lyrics and the possibility that they could have done away with a few unnecessary transitions which fail to fit the big picture, and save any mention of the band behind the album until the very end. Hell, maybe I’d say nothing at all and save a rant such as this for a completely separate follow-up article, just to make a point. But since that is not an option, and traditional reviews aren’t my style, the rant will stand alone.
One review I read quoted Akerfeldt as saying “I think you’ll need a slightly deeper understanding of our music as a whole to be able to appreciate this record.” The reviewer’s relative point was not particularly kind, and perhaps mine won’t be either, but I honestly find the quote precisely on the mark. Akerfeldt isn’t some rock solid icon of metal, unyielding and impervious. He’s no Lemmy, no Bruce Dickinson. Perhaps his last few albums were heavy and aggressive enough to make people think otherwise, but what they reflected for me was something quite the opposite–a sort of susceptibility to musical trends, overbearing producers, and well-deserved fame. It was a softness, almost a sort of frailty, that made Orchid, Morningrise, and My Arms Your Hearse so breathtaking, and the more he matured and rose to stardom the more that authenticity faded away, to be replaced eventually by dynamic-driven death metal of the popular sort that only excelled in perfecting a genre with little to no redeeming value to begin with. I think some of his original spirit has resurfaced on Heritage, albeit only slightly and in a very different form. Akerfeldt dumped off a lot of baggage when he chose to create Heritage the way he did, and from what I’ve gathered in interviews, he doesn’t intend to turn back. In retrospect, I’m pretty excited to see what will follow as the leech of popularity upon his creative genius begins to contemplate younger blood. But that wasn’t my first impression. Initially, abandoning all expectations, I just heard something pretty groovy and got into it.
Unlike Abbath’s awkwardly titled sideproject I (which I haven’t actually heard yet), Demonaz Doom Occulta left little to the imagination in naming his new band. According to a lot of reviews I’ve read, he left little to his imagination in writing songs for it too. I don’t know that I can develop much of a case to the contrary, but March of the Norse is still more than capable of entertaining. I enjoy it.
Northern Hymn / All Blackened Sky
It’s definitely not a black metal album. If anything, you might say it’s an Immortal minus black metal album. In a lot of ways it has marks of the generic. The tempo and beat are pretty homogenous throughout, and what you hear is what you get; there’s not really anything buried beneath. There are a few slow moments that harken to Bathory, and a lot of plodding along in a way that characterizes stereotypical viking metal. But if you accept that Demonaz set out to create something pretty standard, I don’t think the results are bad at all. The songs never drag, and despite all sounding quite similar I did start to get pretty familiar with each individual song after a few listens, not just the sound as a whole. At the same time, the similarity with which each song starts gives it a lot of continuity. There aren’t many major transitions. In fact, I didn’t even notice when All Blackened Sky ended and the title track began my first listen through it. Don’t misconstrue that as a decidedly bad thing; it’s not that I missed it for lack of interest. The songs just flow together nicely.
Where Gods Once Rode
Now don’t get me wrong, aside from some pretty cool solos there is absolutely nothing “special” about March of the Norse. If you look for merit beyond face value you’re not going to find much, and I subsequently don’t have much to say about it. But it has value as a background piece. Because it’s neither very enticing nor unpleasant I can really put it on repeat all day long and never have to worry about being distracted from whatever I’m focused on, for good reasons or for bad. When I choose to tune in I always like what I hear, and I can tune right back out with no real effort.
I guess that’s all I have to say. I like this album, and I find it useful. It’s not the sort of thing I would go around recommending, but neither is it so base that only a die hard Immortal fan can enjoy it, as I’ve seen some people claim. Once something new crosses my path to replace March of the Norse as my sort of background album of the week I might never remember it again. But until then, well, I’ve got my $11 worth out of it. It’s certainly not the sort of thing I only listen to once and put back on the shelf. Sometimes generic done well is refreshing.
Geri and Freki does Heerfather feed, / the far-famed fighter of old, / but on wine alone does the one-eyed god / Wuotan forever live.
O’er Midgard Hugin and Munin both / each day set forth to fly. / For Hugin I fear lest he come not home. / but for Munin my care is more.
There Valgrind stands, the sacred gate, / and behind, the holy doors. / Old is the gate, but few there are / who can tell how it’s tightly locked.
Five hundred doors and forty there are, / I ween, in Walhall’s walls. / Eight hundred fighters through one door fare / when to war with the wolf they go.
Five hundred rooms and forty there are, / I ween, in Bilskirnir built. / Of all the homes whose roofs I beheld / my son’s the greatest meseemed.
There is Folkvang, where Freyja decrees / who shall have seats in the hall. / The half of the dead each day does she choose. / The other half does Othin have.
There is Gladsheim, and golden-bright / there stands Walhall stretching wide. / There does Othin each day choose / all those who fell in fight.
Now am I Othin, Ygg was I once. / Ere that did they call me Thund. / Wodan and Oden, and all, methinks / are the names for none but me.
Hail to thee, for hailed thou art / by the voice of Veratyr. / Where Valgrind stands, the sacred gate, / ye will find nine golden doors.
Hail to thee, for hailed thou art / by the voice of Veratyr. / Old is the gate, but few there are / who can tell how it’s tightly locked.
Where His Ravens Fly…
Far from a simple “see you in Valhalla,” Tiurida begins with a faring off worthy of kings, and even before understanding the lyrics you can feel their power in the music. Falkenbach’s 22 years of existence could be described as an effort to express the shared values, traditions, and beliefs of pre-Christian Europe. Written into the music just as much as the lyrics is a reverence for a greater age of man, in which fear and submission had not yet taken the place of mystery and honor. At least, that is what I have always taken out of his works, and perhaps it is why, in spite of the minimal variation in his sound over the years, I’ve always looked to new Falkenbach albums with a sort of reverence.
I never quite got the complaints that every Falkenbach album sounds the same–that he has eschewed developing as a musician and merely continued to produce the same thing over and over again. For while this is certainly true, especially of his last three albums, I would never want anything different. I would gladly take a hundred songs just like Where His Ravens Fly over any change that might cease to capture so fully the essence I’ve described.
Tanfana
I regard Tiurida as a phenomenal success, and possibly the best album of the year. Excluding the decidedly darker and heavier track Time Between Dog and Wolf, what you get on this album are five hymns. There is seldom any anxiety–no desperate or aggressive calls to return to past values, as so many other pagan bands manifest (with much success.) The lyrics are in the present tense, and so, in a sense, is the music. It’s hard to put my finger on what exactly I mean by this last comment, but it definitely lies in the folk side of his sound.
Tanfana is an instrumental song referring to a Germanic goddess of which very little is known. Tacitus’ mention of her in the 1st century is the only surviving source. Fitting, then, that the song should have no lyrics. This song is a very standard representation of how Vratyas Vakyas goes about employing folk music. A few things should stand out right away: The woodwinds are all synthesized; there are no actually traditional instruments at work here. Furthermore, they aren’t being played in any sort of traditional way, with any degree of diversity or improvisation. They are locked into the pace of the song and feel more like a sound sample loop than something performed live in studio.
The effects of this have to be significant, because it’s really what characterizes the folk element of almost all of Falkenbach’s songs. Well, two things stand out to me. Whether we’re talking monks or Burzum or really bad techno, there’s something inescapable about chanting effects. The repetition zones you in and forces you to experience the music in the here and now, whether you want to or not. It creates a heightened awareness of your present state of being. (And it might be why alcohol makes most awful music sound even worse but really bad techno sound awesome, but I’m getting way off focus now.) My point is that an element of this is present in Falkenbach’s sound, not only in the plodding progression of the drums and guitar, but in the folk. The other thing is that the folk instrumentation, being synthetic, bears a commonality with the more standard keyboard choruses he uses. Actual folk instrumentation generally calls to mind an image of something decidedly non-modern, but here there’s very little gap.
So when I say the music is in the present tense, what I mean is that his sound both evades my preconceived disconnection between folk and modernity and zones me into the moment–not of the music, but the on-going present state. Am I just babbling now? Perhaps, but it’s interesting to try and understand what about his sound appeals to me so distinctly from any other band describable as folk/viking/pagan metal. I think that, instead of taking me into the past, it has a sort of capacity to bring the past to me and blur any distinction.
Sunnavend
I suppose we all have particular bands and songs that move us in a personal way and might not have any such effect on anyone else. Falkenbach is just one of those bands for me. I don’t ever want his sound to change, and I’m so glad that on Tiurida it didn’t. This music gives me a unique sort of peace of mind–a feeling that lofty visions of the past aren’t mere idealizations or lost causes, but are entirely realizable in the present. This music is a hymn to the immortal, personified through gods whom modern society has yet to blaspheme.
When Terje Bakken, better known as Valfar, passed away in 2004, one of the most significant bands in black metal passed with him. The remaining members of Windir went their separate ways, forming a number of different groups, and Vreid was one of them. As you might have guessed by the title, they’ve now released five studio albums, and they’ve evolved away from the sounds of their predecessor. I can’t say much for their first four albums, though I’ve listened to them, because I never really paid close attention. So I’ll be approaching this one alone, not as a comparison to their earlier stuff. I just thought I should give a brief history of the band first, since they have a legendary if now distant past.
I can’t heap endless praise on this the way I have a bad habit of doing for most albums. I’ve got pretty mixed feelings about it all in all.
Arche
Though classified as black metal, the driving force behind a lot of V is heavy metal–a perhaps generic term, but fitting in this case. The bulk of the album is very riff-driven. You can get a feel for their multi-styled approach from the very beginning. Though the chords build up into a melodic death sound that eventually breaks into black metal, the song is quick to return to the opening riff. You get a lot of repetition, but also a lot of opportunities for some really awesome solos–something that rarely coexists with blast beats and tremolo. The sound Vreid’s created here opens the doors to a lot of metal elements generally absent in specifically black metal, and the way they take advantage of it–the ample guitar solos first and foremost–are the album’s biggest highlights for me. You’ll hear plenty of death metal and (not exactly foreign to the genre) thrash metal as well.
The Blood Eagle
But there are some major detractors. I’m not always convinced that the sounds they put together really work. The Blood Eagle could be a pretty cool if simplistic heavy metal song, but the singer kind of kills it for me. I love his vocal style. I really do. But if perfect for black metal, it just doesn’t always work laid over a song that just as frequently calls to mind Iced Earth. Actually singing could make this song work. Alternatively, I could see them pulling off some deep, guttural death metal vox here. But the contrast between the tameness of the song and the shrill harshness of black metal vocals doesn’t find a rewarding middle ground. A lot of the album’s lyrics are pretty suspect too, especially, again, on this particular song. The opening lines, “Born out of worlds of fire and ice / The nature of spirits embrace our lives / From the underworld to above / We worship the fertile soil“, cease to be plausibly uplifting and just sound kind of sissy when followed up by a chorus of “Carved in the back / Blood-strained wings are dressed / An image of grotesque / The blood eagle of human flesh“. Pagan spirituality and gore-grind guts-fucking just don’t mix.
The Others and the Look
On some tracks, this one a great case in point, all of the elements Vreid employ come together to create diverse and enjoyable songs that never bore. On others I struggle to pay attention at all. Most of them have rewarding bits here and there with a lot of drag in between–repetitive riffs like in Arche and acoustic/keyboard interludes that don’t amount to much. I suppose it doesn’t help that I’m not fond of death metal, which Vreid seem to incorporate a lot of; someone with opposing tastes may well hear this album from a very different perspective and find it quite the success. But given all the other new material out there, it’s pretty unlikely that anything will move me to keep on listening to this one. I think that’s my final verdict on V: not bad, but too frequently boring for its positive features to really shine.
Up until late July, Nekrogoblikon were a nearly forgotten gimmick. Their first and only previous album, Goblin Island, was released in 2006, and that was the last I ever heard of them. Aside from telling the story of an extra-terrestrial goblin invasion of the most heinous sort (they even ruin Christmas), it featured, among other things, sound clips of the band screaming like little girls, an actual stereotypical Christmas song, a cover of In Flames’ Artifacts of the Black Rain with all the lyrics substituted for banter about goblins, and a dance beat chiptune outro. Musically, it was simultaneously a mockery of a lot of the bands that probably influenced them and a pretty decent, enjoyable imitation of them. But it was never funny in say, a GWAR or Alestorm sort of way. It was more like a Weird Al thing–a novelty. You laugh, but you really don’t want your friends to know you listen to it, and you never play through it twice in a row.
Goblin Box
Their new album is a very different beast. Over the past five years they’ve actually matured into really good song-writers. Don’t get me wrong, Goblin Island had some really catchy tracks, but in the music just as in the lyrics there was a sort of audible immaturity, by design of course, that made light of the bands they were imitating. On Stench this notion is more internal. That is, they’re still parodying Children of Bodom, Finntroll, and just about anything in between, but instead of hearing a bunch of kids making a joke you hear a bunch of goblins being goblins. The immaturity is no longer in the execution; it’s encased in really solid music that, given better production value, could rival many of the very same albums it pokes and prods.
Basically, on Stench the line between a musical parody and a successful cross-genre epic metal masterpiece is very grey indeed. Yet the lyrics are just as blatantly whimsical as ever. The result is hard to swallow, because it’s so good and so bad at the same time. I imagine the spoken ending of this song is a rip on Rhapsody of Fire’s infamously lame spoken lines; it goes approximately “The humans had opened the box to torture and maim all kinds of magical creatures, but the goblins were not to be trifled with. No, not to be trifled with at all. And as the humans laid there, a pulsating mound of bone and flesh, dead and mutilated beyond all hope and reason, the goblins feasted upon their rotting corpses, filling the halls with the shrill sound of chilling laughter….. Forever!” And yet when you listen to it, beneath the cheese you get the feeling that it’s a really badass ending.
It took quite a while for me to get sufficiently passed the fact that it’s a parody to enjoy it in its own right. That was Stench’s initial impact: a part of me was left feeling like I’d been cheated out of something awesome on par with Ensiferum and Equilibrium, but the more I listened to it the more I wanted to click repeat, plant my hand firmly in the center of my face, and grin from ear to ear underneath it. At this point I can safely say I love it unconditionally.
Gallows & Graves
There’s something of a third dynamic going on here as well, and it’s what really tips the scale towards greatness. In some odd capacity this really is, well, goblin metal. If we think of them as those short, mischievous little tinkers that are a good bit like gnomes with the added plus of being spawns of Satan, you can actually hear something of this in the music. Goblins ARE both comical and evil, and while Goblin Island was too much of a joke (albeit a good one) to capture this, Stench pulls it off. Trolls and vikings and pirates have all acquired a sort of musical imagery, much of which isn’t meant to be taken entirely seriously. The idea of a goblin is a good deal less serious than all of those to begin with, and if I was going to “seriously” create a metal sound to capture them, well, Stench seems pretty on the mark. The frantic intro/chorus melody of Gallows & Graves and the kind of childish clear vocals really do call to mind some small, obnoxious, vicious little bugger hopping around your feet, and this same musical imagery reoccurs throughout Stench with a consistency that Goblin Island lacked.
A Feast
It’s really hard to talk about what Nekrogoblikon “accomplished” on this album with a straight face, but the fact of the matter is Stench is really damn good. They manage to successfully combine elements of more metal sub-genres than I can count. It’s also got the clever bonus of thematically justifying all of its potential negatives. Goblins are as obnoxious as they are evil, right, so if they’re mocking a bunch of their metal predecessors musically it’s only natural. This is goblin metal.
Happy Labor Day! In honor of this holiday, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge a unique genre of film that truly sparked my love affair with cinema. That genre, as you may have already guessed, was Italian horror.
Today’s song of the day comes from one of the greatest of the Italian horror films, Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2. While the film’s very true artistry is often overshadowed by its infamous reputation and the score itself is clearly a product of its time (the late 70s), I think that Zombi 2 was a cinematic high point in general and a masterpiece of horror in specific. And a large part of that was due to Fabio Frizzi’s operatic yet foreboding score.
Here then is today’s song of the day, Fabio Frizzi’s Main Theme from Zombi 2.
