The history of Saor is a bit deceptive. If you’ve heard the name at all, you didn’t until last year, but the man behind it has been around for some time now. Before Scotland’s Andy Marshall chose this name for his solo project, he released Eternity as Askival in 2009. He was also a major factor in Where Distant Spirits Remain by Falloch in 2011. Neither of those albums stuck with me well enough for me to remember how they sound off the top of my head today, but I do have them. That tells me this is a musician with a good bit of experience, who managed to get his name out there well before he changed it to Saor. Aura is apparently his second release as Saor — he released Roots last year, and I’ll have to make a point to go check it out. If it sounds anything like Aura, it will be well worth the trouble.
Saor – Children of the Mist, from Aura
It does not take long for this five song, 57 minute album to convince you that it has something special going on. The opening track, “Children of the Mist”, erupts almost immediately into a graceful, distinctly Gaelic sweep of woodwind, layered atop well-mixed metal that lets the folk melody shine without much intrusion. The piano and string that follow seem to float in the air, painting a vivid landscape that seems to mirror the album’s cover art. The vibe is similar to Waylander of Northern Ireland, and it feels like it could drift on forever without losing any of its opening grandeur. Around 4:20, the metal briefly gives way to a beautiful cloud of strings and traditional drumming, soon to be met by blast beats that, much like on Kentucky by Panopticon, manage imbue the landscape with life rather than darkness. As the song continues on, you hear a wide variety of folk, pagan, and black metal techniques employed towards this same end of adding a feeling of life and spirit to the nature scenes that the traditional instrumentation invokes.
Saor – The Awakening, from Aura
This approach holds true throughout the grand bulk of the album. The melodies always arise from the folk instrumentation, with the metal serving a supplemental role of forcing you to feel directly engaged in the moment–a temporal witness to some eternal tranquility. It is a devout album, alive in reverence for the spirits of the land. From start to finish, it varies relatively little but never disappoints.
I suppose the terms “folk” and “pagan” can get thrown around rather haphazardly at times, without much of a clear distinction. One tends to conjure to mind lighter, “fun” bands like Korpiklaani and Alestorm, the other more serious bands such as Waylander and Drudkh. Sometimes this seriousness generates a sort of militarism or savagery, rendering bands like Arkona and Nokturnal Mortum far more intense than anything traditional black metal has produced on its own (and far too often, in Nokturnal Mortum’s case for instance, this gets vandalized by absurd notions of supremacy). But this does not always have to be the case. On Aura there is never a hint of desperation or brutality. The feeling is purely of peace and reverence boldly denying that the tradition it embraces has been in any way weakened by the modern world. “Folk” and “pagan” both denote music focused on ways of life that are no longer socially acceptable or possible in a modern, technologically advanced, monotheistic world. If folk suggests people, pagan suggests religion, and the religions of old were not based upon some highborn Greek notion of divinity. Their gods took hearth in wood and water and earth. Saor feels like pagan metal in that sort of sense to me. Its folk instrumentation paints the landscape, and the metal imbues it with supernatural life.
Aura is undeniably one of the most beautiful recordings of 2014. Don’t let it pass you by.
When I saw a band described as “crust black metal”, my first thoughts went out to recent Darkthrone and Carpathian Forest’s Fuck You All!!!!. I was hoping for the latter of the two, but I found something far more unique to itself. With a healthy dose of thrash, grindcore, and a dozen other influences in the mix, Fukpig deliver a sound I can appreciate from a lot of different angles. Their discography is showing 18 releases in a span of 14 years, so I imagine a lot of people knew what to expect. I didn’t.
Fukpig – This World is Weakening, from This World is Weakening
If This World is Weakening has the look and feel of a grindcore album, it certainly does not share their typical length. At 36 minutes, there is no lack of content. The album actually feels rather lush, with a lot of experimentation and variation that does not succumb to the repetitive. The title track, for instance, opens with a bit of a doom/stoner drone before bursting into a really old-school black metal grind, harkening to the days when the style was not so distinct from thrash. The vocals are deliciously distorted in a way that reminds me a little of Converge, and I’m already loving it. But Fukpig aren’t content to leave it at a black/thrash throwback. 35 seconds on, a drum roll tosses you into a really desperate and compelling tremolo chorus that turns the song on its head. It wouldn’t feel terribly out of place in a screamo song, and it definitely tosses “This World is Weakening” into a category all of its own. Not too many 2 minute songs can feel this complete.
Fukpig – Fascist Moron, from This World is Weakening
The next track is night and day different. The crusty thrash gets layered over a synth chorus that you normally wouldn’t hear outside of Norway. It quickly goes from a nearly tongue-in-cheek dramatic delight to sick and crunchy in the chorus, and then we move on to a dirty breakdown that makes me want to rock my head into orbit, all to a comical grindcore squawk of “FASCIST MORON!” Nearly every song on this album is a world of its own, totally distinct from the rest. Fukpig manage this while rarely extending a track beyond the two minute mark. The unmistakable vocals and thrash beat might be the most consistent features, along with some faux-dramatic synth, but each track seems to put these to use in novel new ways. This World is Weakening taps just about every trend in extreme music and crams them into explosive shells of crusty, thrashy old school black metal. It can and inevitably will replace bands like Pig Destroyer in my really limited collection of tight brutality–a musical mood that strikes me only occasionally but always seems to lack sufficiently appealing sources. There is an underlining intelligence to This World is Weakening that keeps your mind running when you pause from the direct confrontation long enough to suck it in.
Valknacht is a five-piece paganish metal band from Quebec that have released three albums beginning in 2009–not to be confused with Walknut, the highly acclaimed side-project of Stringsskald from Темнозорь (Temnozor). I suppose I grabbed this album for an obvious reason: it presented a pagan tag from a relatively new act I had never heard of. With the folk and pagan metal scene now fifteen years in the making, a lot of the old stalwarts are simply running low on material. I am always hoping to stumble upon a new collaboration willing to pick up the slack and carry one of my favorite genres onward into a new era. Valknacht could be that band, but it’s going to take some work.
Valknacht – Bataille de Maldon, from Le Sacrifice d’Ymir
The album begins with a 3 minute intro track that I’ll not bother sampling here. You already know what it sounds like. Oars splash through the sea in time with viking voices oooing and OOOing and sometimes aaahhing. Break and repeat with some overbearing choral and brass synth, throw in a gong for good measure, and you will find yourself in the opening moments of “Bataille de Maldon”. Add a dash of synth woodwind, queue the crunch crunch crunch monotone guitar, and remind your drummer to make it metal in a few more measures. The black metal at 2:05 gives us a well-needed boost, and from there the song transitions to something that ought to be really, really cool. 2:40 made me think of Nokturnal Mortum’s “The New Era of Swords” from Weltanschauung, and for about one minute “Bataille de Maldon” is a song I really want to listen to. But the segment soon gives way to something fairly indistinguishable from what came before.
For the vast, vast majority of this 9:30 song, what you hear is an endless rain of double bass, rhythm guitar that only knows two patterns and three chords, a cheap synth whistle that’s totally unconvincing as the real deal, an admittedly interesting lead guitar, and total synth overkill plugging in every gap, sometimes doubled up with layers of “OOOOOOOOO”.
Yet, this could have all worked out really well. This band surely listened to a lot of Moonsorrow, and the string portion of the synth gets playfully close to Nokturnal Mortum at times. But the rest of the synth is just bad. It feels so fake. They use bold brass like they’re Equilibrium or Turisas, but the music isn’t nearly bombastic enough to merit it. The woodwinds have no depth, no air, no punctuation… Аркона (Arkona) is about the only band I can think of that pulls off fake woodwinds effectively (unless others are doing it so well I take them for studio musicians), and they must have much higher-end equipment than Valknacht at their disposal to do it with. It would have been nothing for one of the band members to pick up a whistle and record it proper. The vocals get really annoying really quickly for lack of dynamics or anything interesting to encase them. And the song goes on and on and on without ever adding much of anything. By 3:10 we’ve pretty much heard everything, and there’s next to nothing in the form of build-up or break until we hit a sudden transition at 8 minutes into an admittedly solid finale.
So, am I going to say anything good about this album? Surprisingly, yes. Quite a lot actually.
Valknacht – Le carmin des anges, from Le Sacrifice d’Ymir
The tragedy of Le Sacrifice d’Ymir is that just about anyone listening to this album will get the same impression that I did for its first 13 minutes. How many will keep listening? Few, I suspect, and it’s a shame because by the end this album is sounding pretty damn solid. “Le carmin des anges” is the closing track. It should have been the opening. Here is a song that cuts out all of the bullshit and condenses everything I did like about “Bataille de Maldon” into a much more manageable 5 minute package. The term “trying” drops back down my throat, and I hear some really badass Windir licks connected by groovy breaks and synth again reminiscent of Noktrunal Mortum. Thorleïf’s vocals do a total 360, and his previously dull deeper bellows sound epic when juxtaposed and then overlaid with higher-pitched rabid black metal screams.
The collective sound really works here, too. The Moonsorrow vibe they were going for in “Bataille de Maldon” flopped for a far-too-excessive attempt to be epic. That sort of music is meant to sound earthy, and the synth swarm just made it seem cheap and fake. On “Le carmin des anges”, a lot of the frivolous choral and brass sounds are gone, and what remains works far better with the Windir vibe they’re getting at.
Valknacht – Le sacrifice d’Ymir, from Le Sacrifice d’Ymir
You didn’t have to wait until the last track to find this though. The third, “Chants de guerre”, carries an infinitely more successful Moonsorrow vibe than the song before it. The woodwind’s fakeness is barely significant because the loop it plays is more of an unnatural Falkenbach chant than a harmony. Thorleïf’s full vocal range finally comes into play, and there is way more Windir-esque black metal–a sound they do right. Track 4, “Sur les ruines de Rome”, throws in some seemingly female screams and spoken lines that feel kind of reminiscent of Masha from Arkona, and could be a guest musician or further testament to Thorleïf’s range. (Liner notes for this album have been hard to come by.) As if Masha had been on their minds, track 5, “Le sacrifice d’Ymir”, feels pretty “slava!”, with some frantic whistle and guitar tapping. I had good cause to doubt another 10 minute track, but there is so much more going on here than in “Bataille de Maldon”. Thorleïf’s vocal dynamics alone are enough to make the overdrawn passages–and there are certainly a few–way less dull, the lead guitarist keeps up that Windir kick he’s proven pretty good at, that obnoxious rhythm guitar from the opener is all but missing, mixed down from a nuisance to its proper role and a background accessory.
“De murmures et de givre” starts nice but regrettably returns to a lot of the mistakes of “Bataille de Maldon”–a 7 minute track that could have probably made its point in three and a half. “Que le sang constelle mes mains” gives us our first and last taste of some accordion. Though its synthetic generation is painfully obvious, it does kick off with a melody pleasantly reminiscent of Finsterforst. Again though, the song drones on way too long with boring “I’m going to growl, you chugga-chug, and you hit a whole bunch of notes at once on your keyboard” moments.
So what’s the verdict? I think that this band either ran out of material and had to generate a few filler tracks, or else the minds behind it have some differences of opinion on how they ought to sound and they tried to accommodate everyone. Over all, fans of Windir will find plenty of moments to swoon over, and Moonsorrow die-hards will be modestly entertained. I got a Nokturnal Mortum vibe in some of the synth string utilization and rhythm guitar breakdowns, but not nearly enough to satisfy, and it has to take second stage to a lot of derivative crap. These guys have enormous potential, and they’re relatively young by band standards. I think the inclusion of “Bataille de Maldon” in its present state–at all let alone as the not-so-grand opener–is a little suspect. It would be nice to hear some session musicians for the folk instrumentation, or at least a better keyboard. And they really need to do something about song lengths relative to content. I will have long forgotten Le Sacrifice d’Ymir this time next year, but I won’t forget to check out their future releases. Turisas rose from a totally generic sound to release one of the best albums in folk metal. So did Finsterforst. Valknacht are certainly capable of becoming a band I could fall in love with.
I am definitely not a time-honored, faithful fan of Blut Aus Nord. They managed to evade my radar for over 15 years before the 777 trilogy brought them into the broader spotlight. Sect(s) impressed me from the start, but in a twisted, bewildering way that was not necessarily enjoyable. It was a car accident you slowed down to gawk at in spite of your better judgment. It was a disturbing feast of dementia. I did not hop on The Desanctification right away, naively expecting more of the same, and it was only with Cosmosophy that I finally caught on to just how intelligent and creative Blut Aus Nord could be.
I didn’t go back in time and pick up their classics, but I did eagerly await their next album with zero assumptions about where it might go. This seemed like a band that could do anything they set their mind to, and judging by Kristian Wåhlin’s cover art, it would be something fairly distinct from 777.
Blut Aus Nord – Paien, from Memoria Vetusta III – Saturnian Poetry
What I found was an album that kept a lot of basic elements intact, but, sure enough, sounded nothing like 777‘s cyberpunk journey through a hellspawn-ridden hive mind. Saturnian Poetry feels like much more traditional black metal on the surface, though you will be hard pressed to write it off as such. It takes about five seconds to realize that the blurred tremolo will not be content to loop into any stereotypical black metal monotony. The song jerks upward in a frantic fit, and by the 40 second mark we’re already on to a new rotation. Celestial keyboard “aaahhhs” and a barely sane pattern of motion rip your eyes wide open, and the clean, ethereal vocals at 1:20 tower above as an apathetic higher being uninterested in quelling the chaos beneath it. When the blast beats and constant motion do break, it is never long enough to calm the mood. It is an avant-garde, progressive approach to black metal that I can only compare to Krallice, only where they remain raw and brutal to a fault, Blut Aus Nord mellow out the drumming and keep the eye of a graceful keyboard looming ever above you.
You are being watched as you thrash about into empty space as hard as steel. We don’t know what that eye wants, but we sometimes catch a glimpse of its perspective, as at 5:10, as the beat slows to a plod and the sweeping guitar takes in a vast vision far beyond your natural senses.
Blut Aus Nord – Metaphor of the Moon, from Memoria Vetusta III – Saturnian Poetry
Blut Aus Nord is a band you can sense beyond the limitations of your ears. That was something that struck me from the first time I ever listened to Epitomes 1 and 2 on Sect(s). Where so many experimental black metal bands aim to invoke a feeling, Blut Aus Nord paint a sensory world. The motion of the guitar is so pronounced that you feel the notes cascading around you. Metaphor of the Moon opens amidst a tornado, everything spiraling downward in a rush of energy that encircles you. Wherever their songs might be headed, I tend to feel trapped within them in body–some twisted wonderland where keyboard and clean vocal spirits gaze upon me and invisible forces and amalgamations of lead guitar swoop all around, discernible only through some super-sense that informs me of their presence without ever forming a solid image.
But if I had to pick a fault in Saturnian Poetry, it would be the overly traditional percussion. Beats carried the day in the 777 trilogy. The band’s experimentation with unconventional drum tones added the final layer needed to complete the unique quasi-physical world of their music. On Saturnian Poetry, the lack of this element serves as an occasional reminder that I am, after all, only listening to a song. “Metaphor of the Moon” is the track that seems to extend beyond my attention span the most, at least to a point. I can latch on to it at just about any moment if I choose to, but it sometimes fails to hold me long without some effort on my part.
Blut Aus Nord – Clarissima Mundi Lumina, from Memoria Vetusta III – Saturnian Poetry
That being said, these guys are a clear cut above the vast majority of their competition in the black metal scene. It is hard to believe that France, once known for the raw and unadorned acts of Les Légions Noires, could give us three of the most significant post-black bands of our time, but Blut Aus Nord, Peste Noire, and Alcest surely stand as a triumvirate of progression and experimentation in 21st century metal. Saturn Poetry will never top the 777 trilogy in my books, and generic drumming is to blame first and foremost. Yet I’ll not soon forget a closing track like this–the listener sacrificing himself to madness, screaming towards that eye above, catching unintelligible glimpses that only make his violence more desperate. It never ends, never finds resolution, just continues to implode in perpetual waves of self-destruction. I don’t know that the song, or the album as a whole, has any clear passage. There is no apparent journey here or grand enlightenment at the end, though perhaps I ought to find the first two Memoria Vetusta albums before I pass judgment. Either way, Saturnian Poetry is another shattered window into that twisted, imaginative world that only these French masters can conjure. Whether I see in it precisely what the band intended or not, I definitely see something words cannot easily describe.
There are two reasonable places to start with Aokigahara. One is to point out that that album cover is going to give me serious nightmares. The other is to state that this is an album of contradictions, its Austrian origins being only the most trivial. It is the most over-the-top emo cheese ball of lyrics you could hope to stumble across, with lines like “I’m losing friends and above all, I’m losing confidence,” and “I feel so fucking lonely.” Yet it succeeds in making me feel really, really sad time and time again. And in spite of track titles like “Nailgarden” and “Gallows (Give ‘Em Rope)”, it is really quite beautiful.
Harakiri for the Sky – My Bones to the Sea, from Aokigahara
As one of my first reviews in ages, you could have easily guessed that it would fall firmly in the post-black metal category. But where my last review, Woods of Desolation, showcased a sort of innocent jubilee with limited care for production value and plenty of homage to Explosions in the Sky and Alcest, Harakiri for the Sky’s Aokigahara offers exquisite attention to detail and a “post” sound rooted more in the Agalloch side of the spectrum. The opening track’s plodding dirge offers a lavish soundscape that wants to encompass you in vibrations without ever upping the tempo to a blast-beat driven daze. Don’t worry; there is plenty of that to come. But this is an album meant to be swallowed from start to finish, and not a second of its 60+ minutes feels unwarranted or out of place.
I don’t know much about mixing or production, but I have to think it doesn’t get much better than this. (Youtube bit rates do not come close to doing it justice.) The most immediate and consistently striking feature of the album to me is how well all of the instrumentation melds together. The bass manages to wrap itself around everything and remain distinct no matter how much activity is layered over top of it. The percussion is pleasantly quiet (a modesty so many black metal bands lack) and offers a faint echo that seems to reverberate back into the bass and make the two whole. V. Wahntraum’s vocals maintain their depth even when he rises to the point of an all-out scream (6:20, for instance), and he picks his words to emphasize with care. You might not know what he’s saying, but he manages to convey a sense of sincerity regardless. The guitar seems to bleed into the middle of it all with no distinct range, fading into the doomy haze at its extremities. The end effect is a warm blanket of a sound that wraps around you gently, letting you experience every aspect of it as a unified force.
Harakiri for the Sky – Jhator, from Aokigahara
I must have listened to twenty new albums passively while I worked over the last two days, and my back-of-the-mind impression of Aokigahara was “that one that made me feel cozy”. It wasn’t until I engaged it with no distractions that the darkness of this album really set in. The album cover should have been my first hint. You see the baby fox–an endearing little thing, bathed in warm, fading color–lying dead on a bed of nails and arrows, a grimace of pain across its face. You want to pull it out of the image and hold it close. You want to comfort it. But even if you could reach it, get ahold of yourself. It’s dead. There is nothing you can do. It evokes your most altruistic instincts and denies their use.
The sound of Aokigahara is that same kind of warmth. It is the kind you feel but cannot share, though every ounce of your body aches to. Matthias Sollak and V. Wahntraum let you know this in subtle ways. My first question about the band was “what’s with all this Japanese nonsense if they’re two white dudes from Vienna?” It begs you to hop on Wikipedia. Maybe “Harakiri” isn’t as well known of a word in Austria as it is in America. If it isn’t, “for the Sky” might have given you a positive vibe until you looked it up. I googled “Aokigahara”. I got “Suicide Forest”, a location at the base of Mount Fuji where hundreds of Japanese go every year to end their lives.
So I took a second look at the track titles to this “warm” album of mine. Track two was “Jhator”. Wikipedia: “Sky burial”. Jhator is a Tibetan practice of giving one’s body up for food to sustain the life of others in death. The closing lyrics to the song are “There is only one decision in our lives we can choose on our own: vultures or worms?” That sick knot in my stomach doubled.
Harakiri for the Sky – Burning from Both Ends, from Aokigahara
And then I thought about the track title that had intrigued me the most before I started this little investigation. “69 Dead Birds For Utøya”. I didn’t know what Utøya was, conveniently. The track title kind of already had that simultaneous warm and disturbing feeling to it. Kind of. I think it was the “69” that threw me off at first though, before I started giving the album a serious listen. I instinctively thought it was one of those “when heavy metal efforts to offend get downright weird” moments like Spear of Longinus’s hit classic “YHWH Penis Abominator”. So I googled Utøya. …It’s the fucking island in Norway where Anders Behring Breivik gunned down 69 children and camp organizers.
With the present track blaring in the background, I stared into the album cover in a thoughtless haze, an overwhelming sense of sorrow creeping over me. I wanted to puke, or cry, or put my fist through my monitor, and all from a track title and a melody. Truly great art digs into us and unlocks our deepest, most powerful emotions, whether we want to feel them or not. It plants the seed and screams our reaction louder than anything we can muster on our own. This was no attempt to be “heavy” or “brutal”–no boast about abstract violence or atrocities long relegated to the subject of myth–no Elizabeth Bathory or Vlad Tepes to keep us cool and edgy. This was art doing its job, and while the experience might not always be pleasant, it is always something beyond what we can safely allow ourselves to feel on a constant basis. We forget, we ignore, we desensitize, but the feelings are still there within us. An elite few bands like Harakiri for the Sky have mastered the art of bringing them back to the surface.
Harakiri for the Sky – Nailgarden, from Aokigahara
I definitely started throwing around “best of the year” boasts too early in my last post. I should have kept my mouth shut until I’d done a good dozen or so reviews and not based my opinions on a bunch of superficial background noise listens, because Aokigahara has already struck me deeper than the last album I had a go at. The music is excellent from start to finish without a doubt, but it’s the underlining theme and presentation that tips it on the scale of greatness. From the song writing to the production to such typically afterthought factors as track titles and cover art, Aokigahara bleeds a common creative agenda. The warmth you feel and think and see is real, but any time you try to take it beyond yourself, you find only loss that you are helpless to counter. “I feel so fucking lonely, although I am never alone,” might be a cheesy lyric in and of itself, but Aokigahara manages to imbue it with substance. Real, brutal substance, like being totally impotent to stop a gunman from slaughtering helpless kids. Maybe the lyrical conclusions are flawed; there seems to be a hint of indifference in the end of every song–a resolution that life just isn’t that important. But it is not convincing. The overarching focus is the helplessness, not the apathy. It’s a 63 minute ball of compassion that you simply cannot share. And let’s be honest, who listens to black metal with their friends?
Has it really been two years since I’ve reviewed a new album? The fact came as a bit of surprise, but here it is late October and I’m staring at a massive horde of 2014 releases that I’ve barely cracked. I was a bit more diligent about keeping up with these when I actually took the time to write about them!
I hope to jump back into this business in force, but in case I fail, I’ll not put off the cream of the crop. My album collection is starting to get overrun by “Woods of” X artists; it seems to be the most popular black metal prefix after “Dark” these days. But one among them might be destined to distinguish itself with my #1 album of the year pick.
Woods of Desolation – Unfold, from As the Stars
I spent a great deal of my late teens and early 20s basking in the polarizing glories of post-rock and black metal. The likes of Explosions in the Sky, Sigur Rós, Emperor, and Nokturnal Mortum pumped the residual poison of rock and roll out of my blood and raised me to higher expectations of musical fulfillment. I listened to them not with a care for technical precision or physical skill, but in search of an experience I did not fully understand. Both genres approached this through similar means, but fell short as social stigmata demanded modesty or brutality carry the day. As I grew into an adult, the ice was broken. Neige’s Le Secret whispered its meaning into my ears just as I was old enough to embrace it. He’d broken the Berlin wall of music, and what awaited beyond was strange and beautiful.
Post-black metal, shoegaze metal, “transcendental”, call it what you will. Ten years ago, this album–what the woefully uninformed all-purpose reviewers will write off as a Deafheaven copycat–was not possible. It emerged as many musicians with the same thoughts and greater talent than myself caught glimpse of that beautiful beyond and embraced it. You can name a dozen artists that might have influenced the Australian solo project known as Woods of Desolation, but this brave new genre demands our presence in the here and now. It calls on us to bask in glorious tremolo sweeps triumphant over entwined barricades of light and darkness. “Proud to be living in the echo–the mist of all things combined,” Krallice once wrote, and though they designed to crush it, we retain the luxury to return. When I hear a song this triumphant, that line always comes to me, and the albums that accomplish it are still few and far between. I still love Explosions in the Sky and their ilk, but they offer a different sort of grandeur. Theirs is an experience of climbing to the peak. Songs like “Unfold” allow us to explore the pinnacle at length, from start to finish.
Woods of Desolation – Like Falling Leaves, from As the Stars
To start at the summit and know where you stand. That might be post-black metal in a nutshell. What we can do there… that is still an on-going exploration. Where Liturgy and Primordial roar like lions into the jaws of death, “Like Falling Leaves” is something of the opposite. It accepts the end awaiting it. In this track we don’t hear any of the overarching optimism of “Unfold”. Instead, we’re accepting that something dear is gone forever, and we are held fast in that moment of realizing the fact’s finality. The bulk of the album seems in keeping with these two vibes, sometimes heightened, sometimes subdued, sometimes entwined. “Withering Fields” and “And If All the Stars Faded Away” seem peculiarly triumphant and longing simultaneously, while “Ad Infinitum” is pretty enough for a new Alcest album. Nearly every track bears a sufficiently memorable hook to sound familiar by the second or third play through, and at a mere 35 minutes, it does not waste much time dragging out build-up in between.
I don’t know that As the Stars will retain my #1 spot through the end of the year, especially if I start to pump out album reviews in force again. It is nothing remotely on par with my picks for the last three years, and it suffers from muddy production that can’t always do the song writing justice, but I stand by it as my favorite so far. This is one I’ll keep near and dear to me long after the bulk of my 2014 collection has been forgotten.
Like most of my b.net friends (that is: auction house junkies and achievement whores), I downloaded Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft for a free mount. What I got was an addicting breath of fresh air laced with all the appeal of nostalgia. In Blizzard Entertainment I’ve trusted since I first picked up my copy of Starcraft back in 1998, but it would be hard to argue that the company has not grown a little washed out of late. Starcraft 2, for all its glory, faces too much competition to match the popularity of its legendary predecessor; Diablo 3 was a bore to all but the most devoted series fans; and World of Warcraft is gagging on the fumes that keep it running. I thought BlizzCon 2013 was the nail in the coffin (and I still do), but Hearthstone definitely breaks from the current trend. It is the first Blizzard release since StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (2010) that felt fresh to me.
Hearthstone is an electronic card game reminiscent of Magic: The Gathering. Unlike M:tG, you’re not going to find yourself at a loss for players when your friends grow up and get “lives”. (sigh…) I’m sure plenty of online M:tG-style card games have existed in the past, but what’s significant here is that I have never played them. Hearthstone had a few things going for it pre-launch that genre competitors lack: it is free, it is Blizzard, and its launch coupled with a long over-due Battle.net meta program that makes it highly visible to current Blizzard customers. The minute you click play, you’ll find a few other perks. Peter McConnell’s soundtrack is nothing short of brilliant, the game is conceptually very simple to grasp, and the graphics strike that balance between clarity and imagination that is non-existent in modern gaming. (If you don’t know what I mean by this, consider a modern game with severely limited character development–say Mists of Pandaria–to an old-school NPC overload like Suikoden, and ask yourself which game you remember more characters in.)
Once you’ve been at it a while–I’ve been playing for all three weeks the game has been public–some obvious cons will emerge. The game is highly dependent on card acquisition, and the availability of new decks is unnecessarily limited. Playing strictly for free, a casual Hearthstone fan will accumulate roughly two card packs every three days. A pack consists of five cards, with at least one guaranteed to be rare or higher (rarities roughly parallel WoW’s system of common, uncommon, rare, epic, and legendary). Because the game is new, the total amount of cards out there is relatively low, leaving little room for creative builds that can succeed in the absence of numerous epics and legendaries. Unfortunately, Blizzard offers no easy progress through pay. Booster packs (5 cards) can be purchased at a rate of 2 for $3, 7 for $10, 15 for $20, and 40 for $50. At the outset, nothing short of the all-in $50 deal is going to guarantee you much of an upper hand, and by the time you’ve accumulated 20 or so free decks through casual play the $20 and lower options seem like too much of a gamble. So if you want to roll your way up into the higher ranks, you’re stuck paying the full retail price of a major release or else sticking it out for free over an extended period of time. There is no financial happy medium. You will likely find yourself wavering between ranks 17 and 19 for a long, long time until you’ve gotten lucky enough to build a competitive deck. I would happily pay $20 for 40 booster packs at least once, but $50 is unreasonable.
Blizzard does not currently allow cards to be traded or sold, and that makes some practical sense. (I would just roll fake accounts and trade free boosters to my main until I had the full collection in a matter of days.) What they offer instead is a “disenchant” feature, where you can permanently destroy cards and use the byproducts to craft others of your choosing. The problem with this system is that it leaves collectors in the dust early on. Until you’ve accumulated enough duplicates, you’ll be faced with the unpleasant choice between remaining in the lower ranks and abandoning rare cards.
On the plus side, extensive losing streaks are pretty uncommon. The game seems to be very well balanced to match you against players of similar skill/decks. Skill development will cap out before deck improvement, unfortunately, but the monotony can be broken by a system that allows you to play 9 different classes loosely based around their World of Warcraft parallels. My Warlock deck might cap out at rank 17, but I haven’t even touched a Druid yet. Boosters are not class-specific, so what I earn on an alt class is of equal worth to me. Whether alternate class play too will dull before higher-level decks can be built is still too soon to tell. I can say that three weeks into the public launch, Hearthstone is still sufficiently captivating to chew up an hour of my evening daily.
I love this game not only for its innate appeal, but for its status as proof that Blizzard can break from their self-imposed molds and release a game that is not dependent on a franchise model. My dreams of a World of Starcraft are still far-fetched, but I really, really hope that Hearthstone succeeds. It serves as a reminder that, before Blizzard found themselves inextricably bound to decade-old gameplay models, they were the most innovative corporation in the world of PC gaming.
Did I mention that Peter McConnell’s soundtrack is godly? Russell Bower might be at the peek of his career with Mists of Pandaria, but this is what I want to hear in a game. Two thumbs up for Hearthstone all around.
Shad#1129 on battle.net if you want to hit me up for a round or two. 🙂
One of the greatest minds in music passed away yesterday at the tragically early age of 50. You’ve probably never heard of David Brockie, but I bet you have at least seen a few images or video clips of him on stage as Oderus Urungus, the well-endowed Scumdogian leader of GWAR. Beyond masterminding the band’s famous in-your-face stage antics, Brockie managed to infuse America’s most politically incorrect band with some incredibly clever lyrics and a sardonic whit that seemed to criticize the real atrocities in this world even while pretending to glorify them.
Here is a look at the more human side of the late, great David Brockie. You will always be my favorite live musician, and you’ve taken us beyond hell! I hope you can rest more peacefully now.
…and there hasn’t even been a commercial yet. Ok, I admit this might seem petty on the surface, but I’m pretty goddamn pissed off. Over the years, I’ve experienced Super Bowl advertisements degenerate from clever, creative entertainment to raunchy, sensationalist garbage, and I’ve accepted it. I’ve seen right-wing nut jobs fork over millions to air their political garbage–anyone recall Focus on the Family’s anti-abortion ad a few years ago?–and I’ve kept my mouth shut. But what I saw in the pre-game show today took tasteless to a new level. For those of you who missed it, Fox got the rights to the game this year, and they exploited their control of the content to interrupt pre-game coverage for a half hour of Fox News and Bill O’Reilly lambasting the president.
Think about that, and forget your opinion of Barrack Obama while you do it. We’re talking about the most televised event in the world, and its exclusive broadcaster this year has set aside tens of millions of dollars worth of content time to advertise for the extreme right wing of the Republican party. “Oh, Bill O’Reilly is relatively moderate, and they just plastered a Fox News logo over it; they didn’t bring up many sensitive issues.” Fuck that. If the KKK sponsored a Super Bowl ad for white hoodies you’d all be shitting bricks. And this isn’t a conventional ad–a business transaction–a hunk of advertisement paid for in full. This is coming directly from the network that ought to be responsible for monitoring advertisement content throughout the game. This isn’t a matter of turning a blind eye for a pay check; Fox shamelessly wants you to know that this program has been brought to you by good, god-fearing straight white people (and their wives).
I suppose they’re not going to lose any viewers over it. I’m still watching–albeit on mute now until the ball’s on the ground–and the money’s already on the books anyway. It was just more dope for the already brainwashed really, and a little salt in the wound for anyone who believes in social justice. But if the NFL accepts without further comment that an endorsement of Fox Sports means an endorsement of Fox News and everything that subsidiary stands for, it’s time we all called it a fun half-century and took up soccer or cricket or something.
It’s that time again. In spite of 2013 being pretty much the worst year of my life, I found it a lot easier to select a top 10 list than in 2012. Odd-numbered years almost always seem to produce a wider selection of good music, and I can confidently state that each of these at least border on excellence. Here goes:
10. Ihsahn – Das Seelenbrechen (track: Regen)
There was never a bad Emperor album. Ihsahn’s solo career hasn’t been quite as consistent. The Adversary was an outstanding start, but I barely noticed angL. After was a blast, Eremita something of a bore. Well, what do you know; the cycle continues, and Das Seelenbrechen is outstanding. Eremita seemed all about rhythmic grooves and eclectic interludes, neither of which painted a grand picture for me to take hold of. Das Seelenbrechen, without reducing any of the progressive rock peculiarities for which Ihsahn is famous, reinvests its tension in song structure and the subtler stuff of atmospheric appeal. At times it delves heavily into the world of drone metal, with Tobias Ørnes Andersen pulling off his best Atsuo impression and Ihsahn showing that his unique vocals are pretty well suited for the genre as they stand. The most impressive track on the album might be “Pulse”, if only for the fact that Ihsahn was able to stray so far from his comfort zone and still pull off an excellent song, but my personal favorite has to be “Regen”.
I missed out on Ash Borer’s acclaimed 2011 debut and the 2012 full-length to follow, but the Bloodlands “EP” (it’s still 35 minutes long) found itself well embedded in my subconscious this year. Like many of my selections, I never really sat down and gave it my undivided attention from start to finish. It was a busy year, and most of my albums were experienced as background music rather than a main event. I was kind of surprised to find just how many times I’d listened to this album throughout the year. It was never really on my radar, but I kept playing it time and time again. A twisted, bleak, highly atmospheric recording, Bloodlands successfully captures a traditional black metal vibe that is neither overly passionate nor distractingly aggressive. It’s a pleasant break from the otherwise welcome trend towards a less sinister, more humanizing approach to the genre.
8. Westering – Joy (track: This Will Quiet Us)
Joy is definitely the weirdest album I’ve heard this year that actually worked. Bryan Thomas’s second release as Westering is a cracked window peering into folk, industrial, and maybe even 80s pop scenes, sensible to melodic appeal yet firmly rooted in black metal tradition. To label it another “shoegaze black metal” album would hardly do it justice; the warbling walls of distortion don’t angelicize the metal, but rather demonize the more direct pop elements, creating a final product basked in darkness yet awkwardly catchy and familiar.
7.Ensemble Pearl – Ensemble Pearl (track: Island Epiphany)
It’s sad that this album has gone almost completely unnoticed in 2013. It’s sad that people regard it as another Boris album, or as “Boris and Sunn O))) Part 2”. Because, while it shares much in common with Altar, the cast is quite different and the end product surprisingly even better than its predecessor. While Atsuo Mizuno and Stephen O’Malley reunite, Takeshi and Wata are out, as well as Greg Anderson. Michio Kurihara steps up to the plate along with a fellow I’ve never head of–Bill Herzog–to complete the lineup. The sound these four have managed to assemble is flawless. Smooth as glass and black as night, Ensemble Pearl is a compelling example of music’s capacity to paint a scene more vivid than sight can ever offer.
6. Paysage d’Hiver – Das Tor (track: Macht des Schicksals)
Like Ash Borer, Paysage d’Hiver provided ideal background music for me throughout the year. With a similar appreciation for late 90s/early 2000s atmospheric black metal aesthetics, Das Tor presents a significantly noisier, more trance-inducing break from current metal trends. I fell in love with this album’s capacity for endless repetition as the backdrop for work, reading, and just about any other activity that requires concentration. This particular style of black metal has always really zoned me in and helped me to focus, and Paysage d’Hiver’s take on it is substantially better than most.
5. Mechina – Empyrean (track: Anathema)
Fear Factory’s 1998 opus, Obsolete, was the last industrial death metal album to really blow me away. A lot of bands go there, but few, at least in my experience, are willing to fully nerd out into uncompromised sci-fi fantasy. There is something about the death metal mentality that inclines most bands to play with their nuts out, and it rarely works in their favor. Mechina don’t fall for that. They have no qualms whatsoever about employing clean vocals, dramatic symphonics, and operatic hymns to serve their end. Empyrean paints a lush vision of a futuristic world of technology and galactic combat on the brink of apocalypse. Really stellar stuff. … ha..ha… hmm…
4. Summoning – Old Mornings Dawn (track: Old Mornings Dawn)
It took Summoning seven years to release a new album. I would not be surprised if they were hard at work on it that whole time. Not quite as perfect as Let Mortal Heroes Sing Your Fame, Old Morning Dawn is nevertheless an instant essential within the Summoning discography, never wavering an inch from the solid sound they forged a decade ago. I can’t think of too many albums I’ve anticipated for this long that didn’t let me down (Falkenbach’s Tiurida in 2011 might be the most recent exception), and for that, coming from one of my favorite bands ever, Old Mornings Dawn easily slides in towards the top of my chart.
3. Cara Neir – Portals to a Better, Dead World (track: Peridot)
I remember when I was first getting into black metal and a friend of mine was doing the same with screamo. They seemed like two incommensurable paths at the time. We’d trade the best of what we found, and I love a lot of screamo because of it, but that was his genre and this was mine. There just wasn’t all that much in common between Carpathian Forest and City of Caterpillar.
Times have changed, and much for the better. I’ve tossed around “screamo” and “black metal” in the same sentence before (Roads to Judah), but this is certainly the most raw realization of the two as one that I have heard so far. Portals to a Better, Dead World is another fine product of a new era of metal artists informed beyond their flagship genre. It might not achieve the fame of Deafheaven’s Sunbather, but the two go hand in hand.
2. Deafheaven- Sunbather (track: Dream House)
And that brings us to the most hyped metal album of 2013. Sunbather turned more heads than Roads to Judah, and certainly more than Liturgy’s Aesthethica or Krallice’s Diotima back in 2011. But while the mainstream world regrettably failed to recognize that year as the grand coalescence of heavy metal’s mid-2000s paradigm shift, on Sunbather we reap its fruits. This album is not the novelty many would like to make of it; it is an affirmation of things already come to pass, and a glorious one at that. Music seems to come in sequences of waves, the reluctant undertow of their predecessors slowly dissipating beneath the growing weight of those rushing to shore. Sunbather basks in a new era of aesthetics and ingenuity first dreamed by the likes of Ulver, pressed into form by Agalloch and Alcest, and finally swept into the mainstream three years ago. Love it while it lasts, and amuse yourself with the die-hards that will rip this to shreds rather than embrace it.
1. Peste Noire – Peste Noire
And then there was one. I proclaimed Peste Noire the best album of 2013 about an hour after it leaked back in June, and nothing since has come even close to shaking that resolve. I’ve been doing a “top 10 album” list now every year since 2002, and Peste Noire is the only band to ever take the #1 spot twice, but never mind that. Ballade cuntre lo Anemi francor has absolutely nothing on what you will experience here. Let’s try “top 10 metal albums ever recorded”. I have never heard anything quite this clever, filthy, intelligent, and depraved in my life. Famine’s “black ‘n’ roll” sound has never been better, and Peste Noire can rightly be regarded as the refinement of all of the finest features of his past four albums rolled out into one.
The album is heavily enhanced by Famine’s new willingness to tell us what it’s all about. Up through the release of L’Ordure à l’état Pur in 2011, it was anyone’s guess what Famine’s peculiar album antics were all about. He was completely inaccessible as an individual, and his lyrics have always been in French. The man behind the music has since emerged full-formed as an internet personality, conducting interviews, approving lyric translations, and responding to forum inquiries in surprisingly fluent English. He’s revealed himself as an extremely culturally and musically informed character with a sardonic sense of humor that seems to abate the more offensive features of his image, and he completely reformed my view on L’Ordure à l’état Pur–an album I’d initially disregarded, but have since grown to love.
I tried to give Peste Noire a fair review over the summer, but I couldn’t quite do it justice. This article does. Skip to 20 minutes in the above video if you care to hear my favorite track on the album: “Niquez Vos Villes”.
Through the Shattered Lens 