Japan’s three-piece prodigy Boris have played every style of music in the books over the years, and they do it all well. “Intro” appears fairly early in their discography, on the 2005 reissue of Akuma No Uta. (The original 2003 release features a much shorter intro track.) If you had any question about the sort of diversity Boris brought to the table even this early on, you could look at Akuma No Uta‘s multiple album covers. One was a play on the cover art of Bryter Layter by Nick Drake. Another, Welcome to Hell by Venom.
This track also made my mix after I used it in a game. The task I set for myself when I purchased a copy of RPGMaker was to take an incongruous cyberpunk story written by a bunch of kids in the 90s and make it work. It was in pretty bad shape. Apparently being chaotic evil made you a great candidate for leadership; the CEO calling the shots was supposedly some genius who had carefully crafted his rise to power, but then he’d turn and do crafty things like scream “bwahahaha” and murder his advisers. It was the sort of nonsense only a bunch of children or Joseph McCarthy could dream up. I wanted to retain the basic progression of events–I was doing this for fun and nostalgia, after all–but the opening sequence, where the leader shoots a passenger airline out of the sky in order to sense the euphoric death rattle of hundreds of innocents burning in unison, was uh…. yeeeeah….
When I listened to “Intro” by Boris, the scene rewrote itself. The plane was suddenly slowly drifting over a scene of urban anarchy, where police stations and hospitals barely hung on behind walls of garbage and broken glass. Casinos and brothels lit up the night sky. The pilot commits a minor breach in security protocol while requesting permission to land, and a culture of paranoia spirals the situation out of control. Ultimately, a general authorizes force with a hint of satisfaction, and the plane explodes. Wata’s high pitched, siren-like guitar seems to simulate ambulances rushing to the scene. Boris set the tone for how I would rewrite the entire script. The foreboding, dystopian vibe of this instrumental song was powerful enough alone to create a setting I couldn’t handle with graphics and dialogue at my disposal.
On a bit of a lark, I posted an article last week about some of my odd experiences as a kid on the internet in the 90s. That got me listening to a bunch of music that has no obvious connection to the things I wrote about. My metal choices became more industrial. I fired up the Lost in Translation soundtrack for the first time in ages. I fell in love with vaporwave’s sardonic spin on muzak and smooth jazz… Hey, this sounds like an excuse to post a music series!
90s internet was obsessed with fantasy and science fiction. “Nerds” were more likely to be online. (My family got dial-up because my mother was a computer programmer.) Free online gaming was dominated by MUDs and forum RPGs, as they were well suited for text-based environments and stemmed from a long tradition. Most of all, it was the easiest place for that demographic to congregate. (Why do we have Sports Bars but not Dungeon Masters’ Taverns?) If you came to the internet enjoying console RPGs, you might well leave loving anime and Dungeons & Dragons, too, and sharing an odd obsession with that island off the east coast of Asia that gave us so much of it. Japan was an exotic world full of technologically advanced cities, as I imagined it, and its number one export for me was high-tech fiction.
That is how I came to engage futuristic universes like Akira and Ghost in the Shell. Japan brought cyberpunk into the mainstream for my generation. (It was years before I watched Blade Runner.) The internet was the new frontier of technology, so the genre sort of resonated with the medium through which I encountered it. Ghost in the Shell in particular asked a lot of relevant questions regarding how technology impacted identity. On the internet, anonymity was a sort of virtue, and that always fascinated me. I also saw, as time went by, a lot of commonalities between the internet and cyberpunk’s dystopian societies. Corporate monopolies replaced niche vendors. Advertising expanded wildly, still all in-your-face pop-up adds pushing pornography and all-you-can-eat, 0%-down, free trial chances to become an instant winner. Forums became overcrowded, scaling up from hundreds of active users to tens of thousands. Screen names ceased to provide even temporary identification as people no longer bothered looking at them. Copycat conformity and superficial cheap thrills dominated where people had once engaged each other with thought and imagination.
In both cyberpunk and the internet, you had an acknowledged gap between the corporate world and the masses. In Final Fantasy VII, for instance, Midgar’s dark, towering inner city emitted a filth of neon commercial sleaze and ill-earned luxury that opposed the sunshine and suffering warmth of its dilapidated ghettos. This disparity was clear, both to the player and to Midgar’s fictional inhabitants. The antagonists were balding, broad-wasted businessmen and corporate gangsters. The heroes toppled the system through sabotage, creating a ripple effect that rocked the masses and–not so much in FF7, but definitely elsewhere–turned them against their corporate overlords. The fact that capitalism felt evil or sleazy, both online and in the fiction, proved awareness of the gap. If the system was working properly, the masses would willingly accept their position and not eye commercialism warily or respond to tremors beneath. There would be no vulnerability–no means to revolution–and subsequently, in a lot of these stories, nothing to drive the plot forward.
The gap emerged in fiction because it made for an interesting story. It emerged in real life because the internet simply hadn’t been reigned in yet. Corporations were still scrambling to keep up with rapidly changing demands emanating from an unregulated hive mind. In both cases, the appeal was a sense of empowerment. Anonymity within an unstable system enabled anyone, theoretically, to mastermind changes in behavior of the masses and then slip back into the shadows. It was a utopian dystopia. It was too easy.
Today’s social media, integrated subliminal advertising, and tailor-made instant-gratification entertainment indicate a highly functional, invulnerable corporate society. The internet is a bleak, soulless place where people narrate their artificial lives to the wind, proudly displaying every ounce of their shallow identities. You might grasp the banality for a moment and try to spread the word, but open ears are hard to come by, and before you seek them you just have to watch this Youtube video about the 10 craziest moments in… something. C’est la vie.
But that is why internet and the 90s makes me reflect nostalgically on sweaty used car dealers in crooked toupees; Tokyo as an exotic, futuristic world; Groomed corporate elites snorting cocaine on their private jets; Sleazy, shameless advertising; Revolutions begun by untraceable, nameless figures in archaic chatrooms; The machine consuming itself and collapsing into anarchy; Most of all, the freedom to roam a vast, incomprehensible urban landscape without consequence.
Maserati are a post-rock band from the music capital of the southeast: Athens, Georgia. “Inventions” appears on their 2007 release, Inventions for the New Season (which I always thought was a really awkward title). Their line-up at the time included the late Jerry Fuchs, who was involved in a lot of significant acts before his tragic death: !!!, MSTRKRFT, LCD Soundsystem.
This song found its way into my mix as a result of my brief foray into RPGMaker. I got it in my head to make a cyberpunk RPG based loosely around a collaborative story that I took part in back on the Nintendo.com forums in ’98. Futuristic tile sets were pretty hard to come by, and I turned to music to set the tone of the game. I put “Inventions” to work when the player finished up the introduction sequence and became free to explore. The song captured for me the feeling of walking along the massive streets of a futuristic city in the dead of night.
My childhood heroes all had the first name “NOA”. They were the living, breathing avatars of Nintendo of America. And Nintendo was perfection, for all practical purposes. But like demigods, they were simultaneously divine and human. NOAPaul was a tough guy. A real street thug, with a tongue ring and everything. NOATravis, he was your boyband jock. Oh, the envy. And NOAAmy… did you know that she played Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger? I did. Imagine it: a girl who played RPGs.
One day, I was going to be a Nintendo Power Cyberjock too. It was my highest aspiration. Forget astronauts and fire fighters. If Paul and Travis could become Nintendo of America, so could I. And maybe I would make Amy my wife, though she was a withering old spinster of 24.
At 11 years old, I was dedicated to my future career. To become a professional avatar of Nintendo, you had to really know your facts. I was already on the right track, because I owned all 84 issues of Nintendo Power magazine. The knowledge was at my fingertips, but it was vast… so I decided to cheat.
I booted up my Gateway 2000 386/25–it was mine in practice, since my mother finished college–and I headed straight to WordPerfect. If I could quickly search a game name and know exactly which issue and page to check for information… A month later, I possessed a complete index of the entire Nintendo Power catalog. And you thought you were a lame kid.
But there I was, equipped for battle. Ask me about a game. I dare you. I had it down to a science. I could look up a relevant article and spit out an answer within a minute, and Nintendo of America would never know that I cheated. They would think I was just that good. I sent in my job application right then and there, along with a crayola masterpiece of Samus Aran battling Ridley.
I didn’t get the job, but that was probably for the best, since we did not actually subscribe to dial-up internet for another six months and “Cyberjocks” worked online. A minor technicality. Still, I kept Nintendo Power Issue 84 close at hand.
The fame. The glory. The honor.
*Section removed due to copyright issues. They were compressed scans of an out of print magazine spread welcoming you to the Nintendo Loud House with some amazingly dorky-looking staff members striking a pose.*
My first actual experience on http://www.nintendo.com, some time in 1996, was overwhelming. I had waited so long for this. Line by line, the pixels of that jpeg unfurled in slow motion. “Nintendo Power Source”. “Welcome to http://www.nintendo.com”. I was there. And it was wonderful.
Nintendo.com was a disorganized sea of information that you could spend all day exploring (especially on a 14.4k modem). There was a frame up top filled with totally nondescript or misleading images that would link you to different parts of the site, and each of those sections had its own upper frame of links. They could take you anywhere. The internet had no rules yet, you see. For instance, there was a really buried subsection called the “N-List” that linked all kinds of random fan sites totally unmoderated by Nintendo, mostly hosted on Geocities. As a consequence, through Nintendo.com you discovered such wonders as this flattering photo of the founder of popular present-day gaming website RPGamer:
(Sorry.)
Ultimately though, I went to the Loud House. That was where the NOA gods resided. To get there, I had to travel underground, down an elevator shaft that consisted of scrolling really far in a narrow frame to the left. If I thought the main site enormous, the Loud House was madness. They had a proto-forum–everyone still called them bulletin board systems then, though it was not an authentic BBS–where topics appeared in a single endless list set to a fire-engine red background with the texture of an aluminum tool box. Damn was it beautiful.
I knew there had to be at least a few dozen RPG fans out there besides myself and NOAAmy, but I never predicted this. The realization that I could be a part of a secret society of hundreds of Square(soft) aficionados must have waylaid my dreams of working for Nintendo for a time, because I don’t remember doing anything but theorycrafting Final Fantasy III (sic) for the next few months. I would spend every school bus ride studying my official players guide, looking for minute typographical errors that could be exploded into radical theories to share with my peers. I actually killed 4,000 dinosaurs in that forest near the Veldt in the false hope of resurrecting General Leo.
Eventually the forums changed, and so did I. They became more manageable and subdivided into “boards”. Me, I became 12, and that meant responsibility. I couldn’t just be another anonymous Joe researching Final Fantasy VI anymore, aging in obscurity as fame and fortune passed me by. I needed to get back to my dreams, and that required becoming involved in the social community. So I did what anyone would have done back then to turn the page: I changed my name.
That was a principle of the Old Internet that runs totally counter to modern social media culture and may have culminated with 4chan and the birth of Anonymous–the hactivist organization that never actually existed yet frequented headline news throughout 2008. You were really empowered to dictate how a community perceived you. You could completely ‘reset’ your identity at the click of a button, experimenting with different personas until you found one that jived with the community. Nintendo Power even encouraged this behavior in Issue 72:
So died BobaFett207, and a new entity dove into the RPGs board with a mission to earn the unrivaled respect and adoration of its citizens. (His mom also lifted the half hour limit on web browsing, so he actually had time to read replies and stuff.)
What I found was appalling. My plans were immediately surmounted by a more pressing issue. The release of Final Fantasy VII was rapidly approaching, and people were actually discussing the Playstation.
The Playstation. The Sony Playstation, in what would one day be my Nintendo kingdom. These were the filthy traitors who planned to endorse Squaresoft’s debauchery, and they had to be destroyed. I charged head-first, furious and uncaring of the consequences. “JERK!” “IDIOT!” “HOW COULD U!” I let the hatred flow through me, channeling it into dozens of single-sentence replies, until a thread title appeared that gave me pause. It said “ATTN: SHADOW 4000”. That was me! Registered only one day, and my new identity was already known to the community! The post, no doubt, would praise me for my heroic defense of truth and the Nintendo 64.
It did. This was where, in retrospect, things got weird. I wasn’t banned by a forum moderator, or even told to shut up. No, I was invited to join the NES Knights–a legion of warriors who, like me, vowed to fight against the evils of the Sony Playstation. I was promptly recruited and informed that we were at war with the Freedom Knights, who had organized to defend forum-goers’ rights to enjoy non-Nintendo products.
I earned my first stripes when the PSX Invaders came to town. They were a band of ruffians that would show up every few weeks and ravage the RPGs board by posting hundreds of threads titled “N64 SUX”, “PSX 4 LIFE”, etc. Certain that I could stop the incessant barrage of spam posts, I set a clever trap. “ATTN: PSX INVADERS” the thread title ran, and when they clicked it… BAM! “***FIRE LANCE X***” As I am sure you expected, this worked phenomenally. Two invaders stopped spamming and engaged me with their own barrage of attacks. I parried them as best I could, while fellow forum-goers engaged them similarly in other threads. The battle was long and bloody, but we were victorious.
I had found my true calling. Every evening, after school, I would log on to the Loud House RPGs board and train with my allies or engage rival groups. I even started my own, which amassed over 100 members. This was clearly my best route to becoming an official Nintendo-employed Cyberjock… while that dream lasted. It all came crashing down on Thanksgiving Day 1997. Nintendo deleted the Loud House.
And in its place, they created NSider. NSider was ugly, stupid, and it featured Diddy Kong instead of Fulgore.
>
Worst of all, by far, they renamed my precious board “Other RPGs”. Other! Lesser! Inconsequential! And why? The only reasonable explanation was to emphasize the Zelda board. Practically in tears, I called my RPGs brothers to arms. The Zelda board must pay. That war would last for weeks, because the Zelda board was well organized under the Zelda Alliance. (This same game had been going on there all along, despite there being almost no overlap in users.)
As it turned out, the game was not just an RPGs board thing or a Nintendo.com thing, but a common trend throughout the internet. As we transitioned away from NSider to Geocities and forum hosts like VantageNet and InsideTheWeb, we encountered more of the same everywhere. It was as if thousands of kids were dumped into an empty field and told: “Play. No one is watching.” You will never find a Wayback Machine record of the bizarre, seemingly pandemic consequences, but if you were socially engaged in the 90s internet before high school, you probably belonged to some sort of guild.
I tended to see a change in people when they got to be 13 or 14, and the game for them might transition into an interactive story. These were shared universe worlds in which participants would write a collaborative fiction story through their individual characters’ perspectives. It wasn’t RP, but rather a real (poorly written and highly derivative) novel, and it could go on for years. The one that began on the Loud House RPGs board amassed thousands of pages (which were archived). Alternatively, the game would evolve into cyberbullying. Account security was non-existent and cracking tools were a dime a dozen on Yahoo!. A lot of sites also used forms to password protect their content, and the redirect link was usually embedded right in the HTML code. As a high school freshman, you were too “mature” to pretend you were a wizard anymore, so you pretended you were a 1337 hacker instead. It was not uncommon to see a Geocities site vanish over night, replaced by “Conquered by” so-and-so. My first email address got hijacked. It was actually kind of stressful.
But that was the 90s internet as I remember it. …Am I supposed to inject some sort of closing point or moral here?
Rickie Fowler’s performance in the fourth round of The 2015 Players Championship today was definitely one for the ages. He shot six under on the final six holes and beat out Sergio Garcia and Kevin Kisner in a playoff, sealing the deal with a beautiful shot off the tee and a short putt on the most iconic hole on the PGA tour: the 17th at TPC Sawgrass. The sports commentators immediately started to speculate whether this might be the performance that finally launched The Players into Major Championship status, and I cringed.
The obvious argument against a fifth major is that it would dilute the significance of the other four. Four is a sort of magic number long accepted in individual sports as the amount of events that are allowed to matter most. Five would mean that no one Major Championship is as important as a Grand Slam tournament in tennis. Five would make career grand slams even more difficult to obtain. Five would forever taint the man who finally breaks Jack’s 18.
But besides that, being golf’s fifth best tournament is part of what makes The Players special. Sports history is important in golf. You get a vision in your head of how you want that history to unfold, and it gives you an emotional connection to how individual players perform. I want to see Tiger get his game back. I want to see Phil and Rory thrive. I want to see Lee Westwood and Henrik Stenson claim that elusive first major before their careers dwindle to a close. I get a sense of satisfaction watching Jim Furyk and knowing that he did pull it off. Everything ties back to those four majors. Once you win, you’re in the club of legends. I mean, no one is ever going to suggest that Shaun Micheel had a better career than Colin Montgomerie, but his feels more complete in a sense.
And that’s where The Players comes in. It’s the tournament that is almost a major. It is almost complete, but something is missing. It needs more, and the right names in the winners’ circle give it more… but never quite enough. If the majors make legends, legends make The Players. It’s one of the only tournaments where the event and the player can both benefit from each other’s prestige.
Saturday night, I had all but lost interest. In terms of seeing the tournament thrive, the top 10 was a ghost town. I felt a distant glimmer of hope that Sergio Garcia could pull something off (he nearly did). Otherwise, uh, go Bill Haas I guess. Then, Rickie Fowler surged up the leaderboard in the ultimate aura of almost. A nearly major champion who should have five or six wins on tour, his biggest career highlight was his streak of not quite winning scores in majors in 2014. He won the almost major championship in style, proving that he’s just as good as we didn’t quite believe he was. And he beat Kevin Kisner, a guy most of us were rooting against because this was the last tournament we wanted a no-name to win.
Everything about the 2015 Players Championship felt really good. A tournament in eternal need of more big name winners got one. A big name in need of career highlights got one. A guy with no highlights to speak of is now on our radar without having ultimately spoiled our fun. And Fowler’s performance was thrilling to watch besides all that. It’s no wonder the announcers were all talking Major Championship status, but it is exactly why The Players needs to stay right where it is. This year serves once again to show how well The Players fulfills its role as a “to be continued” event leading into the U.S. Open. If we made them equals, we might diminish them both.
A part of me feels totally out of my comfort zone reviewing Marduk, but I keep coming back to the band over the years in spite of it. The classic Swedish style of black metal, as popularized by bands like Dark Funeral, Naglfar, and of course Marduk, never managed to appeal to me much. It was all about this relentless brutality–an aesthetic not far removed from death metal–when I was turning to black metal for its occult appeal. It was Satan as a cold-hearted masochist, but I wanted to legitimize Catholic blood libel. Live dissection vs goat sodomy. That’s pretty clear, no?
But, aside from the fact that they were just better at it than everyone else, Marduk initially stood out to me for their song titles and lyrics. “Christraping Black Metal”, “Fistfucking God’s Planet”, “Jesus Christ… Sodomized”, this stuff was priceless. I think when I viewed it as a comedy I could get into the over-the-top, machine gun-paced blast beats as something delightfully ridiculous.
That sort of entertainment value can’t hold out forever, and it was ultimately Marduk’s shift towards martial themes that kept me attentive. They did it on Panzer Division Marduk in 1999, and they’ve turned to it again with the Iron Dawn EP in 2011 and now Frontschwein. If there is any one thing that this style of music captures effectively, it is 20th century warfare.
song: Frontschwein
Marduk capture the violent chaos of war on a level I have only heard rivaled by Germany’s Endstille, and while modern themes do not permeate all of their albums, they stand at the center on Frontschwein. The album recounts events in World War II from the perspective of Germany as a bloodthirsty machine reveling in cold destruction behind its thin veil of justifications. The connection is not merely lyrical, though Mortuus’ vocals are surprisingly discernible, allowing bits and pieces of war imagery to seep into your head unaided by a lyrics sheet; you can hear to conflict in the music: sliding guitars as falling bombs, blast beats as bullets. It’s methodical, rhythmic, and relentless, in contrast to the more eclectic approach the band has taken on Satanic-themed albums like Serpent Sermon. It is Marduk as I like them best.
That being said, it does feel repetitive at times. This style always does, to me at least, and I feel like Marduk relegated their less interesting songs to the middle, bookending the best of them. “Frontschwein” is followed by the incredibly catchy headbanging march of “The Blond Beast”, and Mortuus’ constant screaming of “Afrika” in the song of the same name forces your mind to picture a bloody desert battle between Rommel and Patton’s grunts. “Wartheland”‘s slow pummel with distinct lyrics like “succumb to domination” feels like an endless wave of Nazi forces marching in to conquest and occupation. The track titles in general go a long way towards steering the music towards its intended imagery. (I absolutely love the album title. I don’t know if it’s a common word or one of the band’s own crafting, but it certainly projects the overarching subject matter: humans as bloody fodder in an unstoppable military machine.)
But by “Rope of Regret”, my ears grow a bit numb to the pummeling. I enjoy the song when I listen to it in isolation, but I rarely can remain attentive long enough to reach it if I’m listening to the album as a whole. The next four tracks, all fairly typical in style, fade together for me whatever their individual worth. “503” is ultimately the song that draws me back in. A song of conquest, it drastically slows down the pace, listing in a dominant voice the conquests of the 503rd Heavy Panzer Battalion. It makes me snap back from my zoned-out state and again picture the album as a vision of German brutality in World War II rather than a jumble of noise. The song is well-placed, because it leads the way into “Thousand-Fold Death”.
song: Thousand-Fold Death
And “Thousand-Fold Death”… holy shit, this song alone is worth buying Frontschwein for. It’s got the best guitar licks on the album, but this song is all about Mortuus. He does things with his voice on this track that will give you motion sickness. It’s not just the sheer quantity of words per second he manages to belt out–his clarity while doing it is unbelievable. If I ever doubted that Mortuus was an incredible vocalist before this song, I certainly don’t now. The album ends with “Warschau III Necropolis”, an eerie, ambient mix of samples from militant speeches and battles, brass, and bizarrely distorted spoken words that manages to capture the grim nature of the album through a totally different means.
There is a reason why I have listened to Marduk more than any other band that plays that brutality-driven Swedish varient of black metal, and Frontschwein captures what I like about them best. I am a bit hesitant to say that I like it more than Endstille’s Infektion 1813, but those two albums definitely stand leagues above anything else I have heard in a genre of metal that, I’ll admit, I seldom find to be very creative or inspiring.
Korpiklaani have been pretty heavily criticized over the years for what has been perceived as a highly “gimmicky” sound. That view has a faint shred of legitimacy, but it gets blown way out of proportion. With bands like Alestorm and Nekrogoblikon managing to pump out really impressive albums without the slightest hint that they take any of their music seriously, it is easy to falsely impose on the genre a spectrum ranging from hoax to serious. You’re either writing brutal pagan metal homages to Odin or you’re dressing up as a mutant snork and dancing a jig, right?
It doesn’t really work like that. Bands like Kalevala (Калевала) and Troll Bends Fir (Тролль Гнёт Ель) can come off as fun-loving boozers, but you can’t escape the impression that they have a deep respect for their cultural heritage. Finntroll sing about dim-witted fantasy monsters eating people, and they’re heavy as hell. Being light-hearted and fun certainly does not make a folk metal band “gimmicky”, as if all folk traditions are inherently morbid. Doing it for nine albums without showing much inclination towards anything but fun and relegating your only English language songs to tantrums about not having enough beer–well, that can tarnish an image. I do understand why people might see Korpiklaani as a having a one-track mind.
But it really shouldn’t, and they really don’t. Not if sounding the same means maintaining the quality that turned people to them in the first place while honing their musical talents along the way. Not when for every track devoid of lyrical content the listener writes off eight others as the same because they don’t speak Finnish. Korpiklaani were very well received when they first appeared with Spirit of the Forest back in 2003. Folk metal was still fairly new then, and Jonne Järvelä was a frontrunner, not a bandwagoner. He had contributed to Finntroll’s Jaktens Tid in 2001, and prior to changing his band’s name to Korpiklaani he had released folk metal under the monicker “Shaman” beginning in 1999. He was recording non-metal Finnish folk music earlier than that. As folk metal picked up steam, Korpiklaani’s pop-centric, lighter brand–characterized by very simplistic metal riffs underscoring catchy yolk vocals, accordion, violin, and an occasional whistle–came under fire. Why?
That’s an open question. I really don’t get it. My best guess is that people experienced Spirit of the Forest and Voice of Wilderness when folk metal was still a novelty. They didn’t really love the band; they just loved the direction that metal was heading in, and Korpiklaani were a prominent example of that. As the scene broadened and more variety became available, some people were quick to throw Korpiklaani under the bus because the band’s pop tendencies made them feel a little insecure in their metal manliness. Korven Kuningas (2008), Karkelo (2009), and Ukon Wacka (2011) got a lot of negative reviews. But to me, the band just kept getting better. Spirit of the Forest gave us “Pellonpeikko”, and “Wooden Pints” is certainly nostalgic, but the album had a lot of half-formed filler tracks too. It has all the feel of an early, less developed work in a band’s discography. They really started to nail the folk on Voice of Wilderness in 2005, and Jonne Järvelä’s distinctive yolk-style vocals–the band’s most unique traditional feature–really didn’t fully mature until Tales Along This Road (2006) and Tervaskanto (2007). Their next three albums took all the heat, but they were only guilty of not offering further development. They didn’t really need to. The band was in their prime.
Manala (2012) was the first and only Korpiklaani album that I had misgivings about. It was distinctly heavier, with folk instrumentation feeling subservient to metal guitar riffs rather than the other way around. For that, it actually got some positive feedback. Korpiklaani were abandoning that “folk gimmick” and getting back to their “metal roots”, or some nonsense like that, as if the band even had metal roots. My speculation was, I think, a bit more realistic: Long-tenured violinist Jaakko “Hittavainen” Lemmetty retired after Ukon Wacka. Short of digging the jewel case out from my basement, I can’t even find a clear answer as to who played violin when Manala was recorded in 2011. Teemu Eerola replaced Hittavainen on tour that year, and Tuomas Rounakari stepped in as the band’s permanent violinist shortly after. I have to believe that there is a direct correlation between Manala‘s lack of a strong folk component and the transitional state of the band’s lineup at the time.
Korpiklaani did not record another album for three years. That’s a long stretch by their standards, and in the meantime Juho Kauppinen, their accordionist since Tales Along This Road, left as well. Was the band doomed to drift ever further from their unique poppy folk sound into the cesspool of generic derivative heavy metal?
Not at all, as it turns out. Noita sounds strikingly successive, but in a way that works wonderfully. It takes Manala and drives it back into where the folk left off on Ukon Wacka. The first track, “Viinamäen Mies”, opens powerfully with a driving violin and a nice accordion accompaniment. Where the folk drifts out, the passages are brief enough to feel like a showcase of Jonne Järvelä’s vocals rather than a void in the content. The song is a total return to Korpiklaani’s poppy folk roots, and that feeling persists through the first two tracks.
Track: Lempo
The third song, “Lempo”, slows down the pace and stretches things out in a turn that is, for them at least, a bit on the heavy side. Unlike Manala though, the guitar is hardly alone in giving it an edge. The vocals are great, as always, and the folk instrumentation blends in and out of playing harmony to the plodding verses and busting out solos in really fluid form.
The rest of the album is a mix of these two approaches, and it is surprisingly the latter that comes out strongest. “Sahti” and “Luontoni” give us two more upbeat, fun songs that don’t feel remotely contrived, and then the album slows back down for the long haul. The violin on “Minä Näin Vedessä Neidon” is about as heavy metal as that instrument gets, and I was especially impressed on the closing track–“Sen Verran Minäkin Noita”–by how Tuomas Rounakari and Sami Perttula seem to have mastered improvisation over long, drawn out metal chords. Moreover, the rhythms on that song are way more diverse than we’re used to from Korpiklaani, tipping a hat to prog and viking metal. It’s one of the few songs in their catalog that don’t follow a standard verse-chorus-verse pattern. I can’t help but think “this is way too awesome to be Korpiklaani” when I listen to it. And I’m one of the people that never lost faith in the band.
It’s hard to imagine, listening to Noita, that Sami Perttula and Tuomas Rounakari were new to this band. Perttula totally gets their sound, and he brings a fiery spirit that wants to imbue anything and everything with rambling accordion harmonies. Rounakari offers much the same on violin, and also a great deal of thoughtfulness. In an English-language interview released by Nuclear Blast to promote the album, he explains each song quite articulately. He even points out cultural relevance in “Sahti”, a song that turns out to be about (surprise!) drinking. (It’s kind of funny, because Järvelä and Perttula’s bad English cater to every negative stereotype surrounding them. I write this song because I like get drunk!) If you didn’t know any better, you would think Korpiklaani had been Rounakari’s baby all along. Hittavainen was a hard man to replace, but I’m not complaining about who they found.
The album does have one very unfortunate, glaring flaw, and it’s called “Jouni Jouni”. “Jouni Jouni” is a cover of Billy Idol’s cover of Tommy James and the Shondells’ mind-numbingly stupid hit classic “Mony Mony”, and it appears right smack in the middle of the damn album. You know what makes even less sense? Noita has a “hidden” bonus track, “Antaja”, and that song sounds totally normal. Instead of putting “Antaja” in the main mix and relegating “Jouni Jouni” to the end of the line after a few minutes silence (or better yet, deleting all record of its existence), they cram it smack in the middle between “Minä Näin Vedessä Neidon” and “Kylästä Keväinen Kehto”. Bad Korpiklaani! Bad!
(Nuclear Blast is being a bit douchey about youtube samples, but if you want to check out some of the better tracks before you buy and can find them, I recommend “Kylästä Keväinen Kehto” and “Sen Verran Minäkin Noita”.)
When I fired up Drudkh’s tenth studio album yesterday, A Furrow Cut Short, I was holding my breath in the dim hope that something awesome would slam into my brain from the get-go. After all, this is Drudkh. Not all of their releases have been met with equal acclaim, but they always seem to carry hype on their side.
The album began interestingly enough, with some bending tremolo guitar that kind of brought to mind Blut Aus Nord, and then I waited a bit and moved the play bar ahead. A pretty cool groove picked up around 1:50, and I rode it for a while. The song began to repeat an earlier passage with vocals tossed into the mix, and I moved the play bar ahead. There was that groove from 1:50 again. I rode it. I moved the bar ahead…
Greatness did not grace my ears in a neatly wrapped box, and that was fine. It was just a distant hope. At that point, my immediate instinct was to browse through the sixty minutes of content for all of the gripping moments that would surely rise out of the long black metal grind to knock my head around. A few came. Should I count them? Was that how best to measure this album’s worth? I started to feel a bit silly. This sort of fast-forward treasure hunt has been my subconscious approach to Drudkh for some time now. Here was a band that used to keep me wide-eyed through ten minute tracks as I waited for the peaks to overwhelm me, and over the course of ten albums the appeal had been reduced to skimming. What changed?
The production changed. That’s for certain. Since Microcosmos, Drudkh have been presenting a more deep and refined sound, and I don’t think it did them any favors. It was a technical improvement at the expense of the unique aesthetic appeal of their sound. They also largely left the world of folk music behind. On Songs of Grief and Solitude (2006), Drudkh reworked a variety of earlier melodies from their metal albums into a collection of instrumental folk tracks. It worked really well, and it’s something they would never be able to do with the tunes of Eternal Turn of the Wheel or A Furrow Cut Short.
Song: Cursed Sons I
<@Shad> One day
<@Shad> I will tell my children
<@Shad> That I started the Drudkh wikipedia page.
And there has been one other change. It’s something far beyond the band’s control, but it is significant: historical context. This first dawned on me when I was glancing over the reviews of A Furrow Cut Short already popping up on Encyclopaedia Metallum. One guy started off by writing “Ukraine is not a country where heavy metal thrives like in the UK or Scandinavia”. I stumbled over the words. I suppose fifteen years is a long time when you’re talking music. There are high school kids enjoying A Furrow Cut Short who weren’t born yet when Kharkiv was carving out its claim on the map of metal. That’s a little… weird for me, but it probably has a real impact on how I perceive this music too.
I will never really appreciate thrash metal, because I was never there. I encountered the genre as a prim and proper, cookie-cutter devolution of its original glory. I lacked the contextual sense that something new and monumental was overriding the standards of metal as I’d formerly known them. To me, thrash is just that sound Metallica pioneered, and I have no doubt that this perspective is woefully misguided. This same sort of historical misconception might be taking root on Ukrainian black metal. The reviewer I quoted… his statement would have been a reasonable introduction to Lunar Poetry or Goat Horns in the mid-90s, but by the time Drudkh started to gain attention, Kharkiv was no heavy metal backwater. It was a placename that you gobbled up. “Ukrainian” meant there was no need to sample an album first. You knew you wanted to hear it.
Nokturnal Mortum put Kharkiv on the map, and Knjaz Varggoth’s brainchild still stands leagues above anything else east of Prussia in my book. But Knjaz is also a racist piece of shit, and I can’t say I feel bad that the history books have been rewritten to regard Drudkh as the mother of all Ukrainian black metal. Still, we can’t forget the pre-existing spirit in which this band emerged. Standardized black metal was all about LaVeyan Satanism back then, its music a sort of declaration against society’s disposition to enforce religious values. “Satan” was a shallow facade, and once the point was made, the scene stagnated. Nokturnal Mortum ignited something novel by merging second-wave black metal’s counter-cultural rage with a sort of Bathory-esque true reverence for the old gods. Their music was as hateful as anything Mayhem or Emperor had produced, but it was also rabidly pagan. NeChrist slaughtered the tenets of modern society, smeared their blood across its chest, and danced naked on the pyre.
And that, to me at least, was the spirit of Ukrainian black metal entering the 21st century. It was not merely violent and destructive, but also highly contemplative. The means varied from band to band, but the idea was to bring a bygone spirituality to life. Musically, the tremolo and blast beats found themselves in the company of massive, sweeping auras of sound that might at any minute break into traditional melodies more savage and tribal than anything the co-emerging folk metal scene had to offer. Astrofaes and Hate Forest were two of the earliest bands to emerge from Kharkiv in this new tradition. Astrofaes, headed by Thurios, was the more melodic of the two, with forlorn chord progressions and folk allusions comparable to early Drudkh. Hate Forest, on the other hand, remains one of the most brutal bands I’ve ever heard. It was Thurios’ original collaboration with Roman Saenko, and it was so uncompromisingly violent and minimalistic that it made the most hellish Norwegian offerings feel tame. Yet it was entirely meditative. If Varg Vikernes popularized the notion of black metal as a trance-inducing journey, Hate Forest went leaps and bounds towards perfecting it.
When Thurios and Saenko went on to form Drudkh, the product was more tame than either of their parent projects. Thurios brought the folk and raw melody-crafting via Astrofaes, while Saenko added the trance state and fine touch for aesthetics. At least, that’s how I’ve interpreted it. I certainly can’t offer any informed view into their song-writing process. In any case, what they crafted, not so much on Forgotten Legends but definitely on Autumn Aurora, The Swan Road, and Blood in Our Wells, was totally unique and beautiful. But it did not feel unique to perhaps the extent that it really was. It felt like a brilliant addition to a scene that entailed so much more. (In more than one sense, and not all positive. I am sure the reviewer I mentioned must find it bizarre that almost every summary of Drudkh begins with a preface that they disavow all ties to racism/extremist ideologies.)
Song: To the Epoch of Unbowed Poets
I take two things from this. One is that Drudkh’s earlier sounds float on a cloud of nostalgia. An album that sounded a hell of a lot like Autumn Aurora would really excite me even if it was not half as good, because it would transport me back to a special place and time. The other is that a once unprecedented sound has become pretty common fair. Atmospheric black metal was not invented in Ukraine, but its modern roots run deep there. A lot of bands around the world have since come along and done more with it. They’ve taken it other places–incorporated it into other, equally novel sounds. Saor is a good recent example. In heaping praise on Andy Marshall’s solo project last year, I passively mentioned that it accomplishes its goal “without ever really breaching any new territory beyond the tried and true boundaries of pagan metal”. Well, Drudkh and the Ukrainian scene in general established a lot of those boundaries. And other bands took it further still, to the point where I could speak of an album like Aura without ever thinking “wow, this is original”.
A Furrow Cut Short has some really stand-out tracks. The two I sampled here especially struck me. But it is also lost in time. Changes to production and an abandonment of folk render the modern Drudkh incapable of reaching to the same plain of aesthetics that they once knew. I don’t think it incorporates anything new, either, that might allow me to hear it as a great example of where metal stands today. This album must stand or fall exclusively on its in-born aesthetic value, while competing with the vibe that it is a watered down version of what the band used to be.
That value is, well, average. You can get into the album if you try, but it will not sweep you off your feet. I am not one of these people who cling to the past and expect a band or style to sound exactly like it used to. I am always willing to humor “where are they headed now”, and I have a good deal of respect for what Drudkh did on Handful of Stars even if it didn’t much move me (or seemingly anybody else). At least they were trying to do something. Even Eternal Turn of the Wheel showed motion. A shying away from change, but motion at least, and I modestly enjoyed it for that. A Furrow Cut Short goes nowhere, and that fact drives home the feeling that this band’s sound has grown really stale.
I am a bit torn about A Furrow Cut Short. A part of me thinks “why did they bother?”, but a wiser side enjoys tracks like “Cursed Sons I” and “To the Epoch of Unbowed Poets” way too much to pretend I’d be better off without them. Still, I’m probably never going to listen to this album again. Maybe a quick revisit at the end of the year. There are just too many other bands doing something more original. And too many classics I’d rather rehash, for that matter. It’s strange, because Thurios, Saenko, and the rest of the crew haven’t lost their touch at all. They are doing great things with Blood of Kingu, and Dark Star on the Right Horn of the Crescent Moon would have definitely made my top albums list for 2014 if I had caught it in time. But considering every single member of Drudkh is in that band, I don’t get why Drudkh continue to sound so… redundant.
I tend to avoid split albums. A lot of times, it seems to me, you just end up with two bands’ b-sides that they couldn’t justify releasing independently. But after my first glorious encounter last year with Spectral Lore–Greece’s one-man circus of musical awesome complements of Ayloss–I am ready to lick up any and every track he’ll throw at me. Germany’s Nachtreich, on the other hand, are not a band I would probably ever stumble upon without this release. I gather that they aren’t really metal. They have metal tendencies on this album to be sure, but from what I’ve read they fall more into the neoclassical sphere. But even if I wanted to skip over their tracks–and I don’t–you can’t really do that on this album. It is not a product of two bands throwing whatever they feel like into the mix, but rather a pretty well-planned collaboration.
Track: Spectral Lore – Quivering
At 46 minutes, The Quivering Lights certainly carries the content of a full length album. The track order, moreover, intermixes the two artists’ contributions to create a single picture rather than two shorter sides to a story. The album kicks off with Nachtreich performing a pretty piano and string piece that would not feel out of place in a movie soundtrack. The first four minutes of “Lights” invite the listener into a warm, subtle scene appropriate for the album’s cover art, and then a lot of things change. We suddenly find ourselves beneath a wall of heavy distortion and arpeggiated piano, as the violin carries on the opening lament to a slow drum plod. It’s a bit jarring–not necessarily in a good or intended way–and it ends as abruptly as it arrived. A calmer piano carries out into the first Spectral Lore track.
On “Quivering”, the track sampled above, Spectral Lore prove more than adequate to answer Nachtreich’s proficiency at writing soft, moody music for piano and string. This song too moves on into metal, but here you have a much greater sense of what’s coming. Spectral Lore, moreover, kick off the black metal in the same grand form that III had brought to my attention last year. Ayloss’s ability to flow in and out of tremolo and double bass is spectacular. The guitar melody is goddamn beautiful, and the drumming restrains itself to maintain a mood devoid of aggression. The fuzzy, expansive vocal noise Ayloss generates feels totally at one with the atmosphere, fading back into an endless horizon. There is no sense of departure from the original landscape set by “Lights”, but rather a sort of heightened state of awareness in which you see all of the shapes and colors in exquisite detail.
Track: Nachtreich – Ghost Lights
The only downside to “Quivering” is that it so overshadows the metal side of Nachtreich that it makes the latter feel almost laughably simplistic. This effect is forgotten soon enough, as Nachtreich’s second contribution, “Greyness”, gives us a beautiful viola and violin duet without any hint of metal (or piano for that matter). On “Ghost Lights”, Nachtreich return to heavy sounds in more measured steps. Growled vocals appear first, creeping up from beneath a shroud of string and piano. It seemed out of place at first, but the more I listen the more I like it. As with Spectral Lore, Nachtreich’s vocals don’t carry the slightest sense of aggression. But here there is no harmony, either. The feeling is of some fetid taint beneath the surface, darkening the landscape. When “Ghost Lights” finally dawns its distortion, the transition is far more natural and compelling.
“Vanishing”, the next Spectral Lore track, picks up right where “Ghost Lights” ends, continuing the same melody on guitar, but it soon proves to be the longest (mostly) continuous chunk of metal on the album. A good bit darker and more chaotic than “Quivering”, its quality is not as forthcoming, but considering how long III took to grow on me, I am not about to write it off. The final song on the album, “Reflection”, is six minutes of brooding acoustic guitar. It feels to me like a song that ought to lead somewhere, and I was a bit startling to realize the album was over.
All in all, The Quivering Light is definitely worth checking out if you’re a fan of Spectral Lore. Don’t let the fact that it is a split turn you away, and don’t blow off the Nachtreich songs either. But if you are new to the band, III is still the place to start. I wouldn’t say Nachtreich impressed me enough to seek them out, but another day and another mood I might yet have a go at them. Their 2009 album Sturmgang got pretty positive reviews. The two bands adapt to each other nicely, and if I sometimes get a suspicion in the back of my mind that Spectral Lore vastly outclass Nachtreich, well, the key word is sometimes. The feeling certainly does not permeate the album, and it easily could have given the way these bands aimed to create a single cohesive work. The Quivering Light feels less disjointed than a lot of albums by one band let alone two. I think the opening track, “Lights”, is the weakest link, and the album is a fairly solid ride through to the end once you get over than hump.
Bosse-de-Nage (pronounced something like “Boss De Nazh”) are a four-piece band from San Francisco. They pumped out their first three albums in a span of three years, between 2010 and 2012, and then took their time getting this one together while cultivating a friendship with Deafheaven that lead to a split 12″ and some enhanced name recognition. All Fours was just released via Profound Lore Records last week, and any serious student of extreme music owes it to themselves to check it out. Just when I thought nothing in 2015 could be more stylistically unorthodox than Liturgy’s The Ark Work (ok, that claim probably still stands), Bosse-de-Nage turn up with an album that’s going to leave me scratching my head for a long time to come. What’s so interesting about All Fours is that you can walk away with a totally different impression of what the band is doing depending on your personal musical background.
Track: At Night
The album kicks off in post-metal mode, ebbing and flowing through a brooding, pessimistic mire beneath Bryan Manning’s desperate screams. Two minutes and change in, the song transitions to the sort of pounding fuzz that might call to mind Converge’s “Jane Doe”. As things continue to change, you get the feeling that it’s progressing towards an ever more desperate state. Black metal seems to play a major role in that intensification, with earlier passages reappearing in a more tightly packed onslaught of notes. The ending, for instance, revisits that Jane Doe sound, but the once cymbal-centric drumming is now competing with blast beats. “At Night” is a song in constant flux, and it could have been an erratic mess, but instead it’s strikingly fluid. Bosse-de-Nage manage to keep a thread of accelerating emotions taut throughout the long chain of ideas and influences that comprise it.
The next song, “The Industry of Distance”, sends a similar message. A simple, clean guitar lick repeats over bassy feedback for the better part of two minutes. Drums sneak up into a slow roll to cue distorted drawling guitar chords, and soon the song explodes in one of those beautiful melancholy post-black metal anthems we’ve been growing accustomed to. Instead of lightning quick tremolo and blast beats though, the drum and guitar initially seem to execute at half the frequency while Manning screams in his uniquely heartbroken style. It creates a sort of oscillating effect for an ear expecting black metal, every other note appearing to be missing. This eventually fills out into full speed tremolo and blast beats to complete another build-up through higher stages of emotional breakdown.
That’s my general metal take on All Fours. While a lot of what we’re calling post-black metal today diverges melodically from the genre’s origin, Bosse-de-Nage go further in exploring the techniques that characterize it. The drumming especially diversifies the package. Tremolo guitar and blast beats signify climaxes in a post-metal progression rather than perpetual constants, and a lot of care is given to make the development taking us there feel natural and captivating. Instead of the instant gratification of say, Liturgy or Krallice, Bosse-de-Nage effectively tap that post-rock tradition of “building up” to it.
Track: Washerwoman
That is probably a more accurate approach to understanding this album, because the band is firmly rooted in black metal. Manning at least has stated that he’s never heard of a lot of the other bands Bosse-de-Nage has been compared to lately. But the more this band diverges in technique from black metal, the more they find themselves labeled screamo and post-hardcore. If you’re familiar with that world of music, it’s a pretty fascinating truth. When bands play with the framework of a classic style, the boundaries of genre dissolve. Yes, “Washerwoman” could easily pass as a post-metal/black metal hybrid. Around the two minute mark it begins to sound strikingly similar to Isis. When the song breaks at four, they could be toying with black metal guitar by letting some of the notes ring out–a precursor to the proper bm onslaught that comes at five. But is that what you hear? Or do you hear a song straight off A Dead Sinking Story by Envy, peppered with spoken lines a la Indian Summer? It depends on where you’re coming from.
Envy-worship is actually how my brain interpreted “Washerwoman” on first listen, and I made immediate associations with other screamo acts throughout the album. I am not alone here. In the early reviews I’ve found so far, this album has been compared to Orchid, City of Caterpillar, Heroin, Moss Icon… Almost every track on All Fours feels extremely influenced by screamo. But it is not. It’s the same sort of thing that happened with Neige on Le Secret and Souvenirs d’un autre monde, when the pioneer of “shoegaze black metal” came out that he didn’t have a damn clue what “shoegaze” was.
I first mentioned screamo and black metal in the same sentence when Drudkh released Microcosmos (2009). “Ars Poetica”‘s climax screamed Orchid and The Kodan Armada and a half dozen other names to me as it slid up and down the neck with drum accents to punch it home, introduced by that classic clean guitar over tense, snare-centric drumming. Deafheaven’s Roads to Judah (2011) resurrected the idea, and Portals to a Better, Dead World (2013) by Cara Neir ultimately sealed it, making black metal screamo crossovers a certain reality. But was there any actual direct influence in any of these cases?
I used to think there was, and I know that Liturgy at least has a post-hardcore background, but any of these bands might have landed on their sounds totally independently. All Fours really sends that message home to me. It’s a window into natural affinities between genres. When Bosse-de-Nage break down the components of black metal into longer, more ringing tones while maintaining that post-bm sense of desperation, they are essentially playing screamo, and the way they seamlessly fuse it back into black metal instrumentation uniquely highlights the similarity. They’re playing post-black metal by definition, but in their approach the two styles are totally indistinguishable save through the cultures surrounding them. When a band can give me a new perspective on an entire genre of music, hey, that’s pretty cool.
Track: The Most Modern Staircase
Of All Four‘s seven proper songs, I am sold on all but “In a Yard Somewhere”. Each builds its way through catchy melodies and interesting stylistic digressions to a convincing emotional climax, and they do it differently from what I have heard before. That it is unique is obvious by the fact that so many people are tossing around band names from way outside of the box in an effort to define it. But there is one other hidden gem in Bosse-de-Nage that stands them apart from the crowd: the lyrics. Bryan Manning has an impeccable flare for the grotesque. From facepalm punchlines about poop and hookers, to really disturbing tales of insanity, to poems that make no discernible sense whatsoever yet pretend to hide some esoteric truth, nearly everything he writes is a ride in itself, independent from the music. Their previous album, III, defies any attempt I could make to describe it, and you should really just go read it all right now. Whether he’s meditatively contemplating a contortionist entering a box or explaining why turning yourself into a human tree was a bad idea, the wording is totally surreal.
The lyrics on All Fours are a little more difficult to decipher, because the stylized sleeve included with the album, for all its artistic appeal, is kind of hard to read. You lose focus trying to dig through it. But The Most Modern Staircase struck me most when I first skimmed over them, and knowing what he’s screaming (not the sort of emo laments his tone of voice might suggest) really enhances the music for me:
I traveled to the province of staircases. The great variety of balusters, railings, finials, and steps filled me with awe. Many looked welcoming, while others were intentionally obscured or blocked up, and some were decorated with vibrant warnings to anyone who might ascend. I found the most modern-looking staircase and climbed. After a while, I stopped on a landing to rest. This extraordinary landing was home to dozens of living statues–obsequious stone gods begging for spare hands. As I explored, a loud commotion with historic consequences occurred somewhere behind me. When I looked back, there was a curtain drawn around the event. I turned to the statues for answers, but they remained inert and silent, their jagged stumps eager for relief.
All Fours: another formidable stalwart in a year that’s been crammed with way more stellar releases than normal. Pick up a copy on Profound Lore Records.
For his first eleven nights in this world, my little buddy Oliver was about as peaceful as they come. Oh, I’d heard the cautionary tales. Men driven mad by blood-curdling screams through endless sleepless nights. But not my Ollie. He’s a happy baby. Maybe his early introduction to classical music helped.
And then came the twelfth night, and stomach cramps, or indigestion, or some god-forsaken gremlin in the bowels. Whatever the malady, it was nothing I could resolve, and four hours of torture later I turned to Google in an act of sheer desperation. The only suggestion I stumbled upon that I had not already tried was white noise. If only I had some! Or did I?
“White noise” turned out to do the trick perfectly. He was sound asleep with a smile on his face within minutes, and I think Ollie has a new favorite band. Thanks Satan; you’re a godsend.
Through the Shattered Lens 