Part of the ‘appeal’ of the second wave of black metal as it manifested in Norway is the feeling that you are listening to a product of truly deranged minds. Granted most of the artists in the scene were fairly normal kids who matured and went on to enjoy long-term musical success, the genre’s focus on the occult, Satanism, and all things traditionally “evil” brought a few real wackos into the fold. Most of them wound up dead and behind bars. Gorgoroth pressed on.
This is a band that continues to project itself as dead-serious Satan-worshiping masochists long after their peers evolved away from the genre’s early image or else dropped sufficient hints to be recast as a sort of warm cuddly metal-spiked parody. Does their sound reflect this? I like to believe it does. “Procreating Satan” is the opening track to Twilight of the Idols, the band’s sixth studio album, released in 2003. It features the most notorious of the many vocalists the band has had over the years: Gaahl.
Producer Val Lewton revitalized the horror film during his tenure at RKO Studios in the 1940s. Working with a miniscule budget, Lewton used the power of suggestion rather than monsters to create a body of work that’s still influential on filmmakers today. Studio execs came up with the sensationalistic titles (CAT PEOPLE, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE) and gave the producer free rein to tell the stories. Using shadows, light, and sound, Lewton’s quiet, intelligent approach to terror was miles ahead of the juvenile (but fun) stuff cranked out at Universal and Monogram.
THE SEVENTH VICTIM could be considered lesser Lewton. It’s not seen as often some of his other classics, and that’s a pity, because it’s superior to many of the better known horror movies of the era. This quiet psychological thriller with its civilized satanic cult was a rarity for its time. Only Edgar G Ulmer’s 1934 THE BLACK CAT dared to tackle this kind of material…
What I especially love about this song is the sustained, poor production quality noise. Utuk Xul, hailing from Cali, Colombia, are not a band to write home about, and The Goat of the Black Possession is not a particularly special album. One especially degrading review on Encyclopaedia Metallum gives it a lowly 25%, and I’m afraid there’s not much in the review that I can argue with. But what may well be entirely generic songs are masked by a really menacing and constant wall of sinister noise. The quality of the recording is spot on, whatever one might say about the song writing. On one hand “The Ancient God of Light (part II)” really captures the aural spirit of black metal. On the other hand it captures everything that’s especially cheesy about the genre it represents.
Kicking off with a liturgical ode to Satan, the album goes on to mimic every stereotype of the genre in fairly generic form. It’s impossible to tell whether the band is trying really, really hard to be evil or whether the whole thing is tongue-in-cheek a la Carpathian Forest, but unlike Carpathian Forest they lack the relative fame to make that distinction relevant. This song’s title refers to Lucifer–the band present themselves as devout Satanists of the literal Christian sort, not LaVey’s variety–and the lyrics are everything one could hope for in especially cheesy black metal: “Call the moon, Lucifer, the morbid star! The ancient god of the light, my force! Lucifer prince of the abyss! Morbid star, light of the abyss! The hell light of the storms!”, etc.
The one thing the 25% review got definitively wrong, I think, is in chastising them for buying into the Swedish scene he dubs “norsecore”. The term is an entirely appropriate insult for one of black metal’s weakest subgenres, but part of what makes most bands in the Swedish scene pretty bad is their refined recording quality; the blast beat ad nauseam routine isn’t an innately bad thing. On “The Ancient God of Light (part II)” (What became of “part I” is anyone’s guess. It doesn’t appear on this album.) I think Utuk Xul really nailed it. The atmospheric noise just screams evil here, and, moreso than other tracks on the album, this song is sufficiently devoid of attempts at song construction to function as one continuous, sustained explosion. I love it.
I actually find The Goat of the Black Possession as a whole fairly enjoyable for the same reason I like this song, but there might be a bit of nostalgia playing into that too. It was the product of one of my earliest completely arbitrary purchasing sprees in search of unknown black metal bands, and in 2003 I had a lot less to compare it to. “The Ancient God of Light (part II)” is the only track I’ll flaunt without reservations, but if you really enjoy its effects as a background piece then you probably won’t be disappointed by the rest.
Whether Utuk Xul really take themselves seriously is anyone’s guess, but intentionally or not they succeeded in producing one of the lamest photo shoots I have ever seen. Enjoy:
Through the Shattered Lens 