Normally, this is the part where I get all reflective regarding the year in metal. I had a scathing year-end rant all ready to go, an ice cold glass of haterade to throw in the faces of the all the people and things that annoyed, dismayed and pissed me off in 2013… and then I read what I’d written and realized that I sounded like a complete dick. What’s the point in dwelling on the negative when there was so much good this year? I had one hell of a hard time whittling down my list to just fifteen albums, and there’s still a lot out there that I’ve either yet to hear or yet to fully digest. It’s pretty darn easy to ignore the mountain of crap when there’s an equally tall mountain of greatness staring you in the face, and yet sometimes I forget that… I guess that’s what my anti-depressants are for. Continue reading “Your world will hate this: THKD’s Top 15 Metal Albums of 2013”
Riddle me this, men and women of the metal community: why is promotion non-existent for From the Human Forest Create a Fugue of Imaginary Rain, the debut album from UK black/death metal madmen Voices? It isn’t like they don’t have the pedigree; the band boasts two ex-members of the acclaimed Akercocke (drummer David Gray and guitarist/vocalist Peter Benjamin), a band that was arguably among the most progressive and innovative of its generation. It certainly isn’t as if Voices have dropped a dud, because From the Human Forest… flat-out smokes. We could sit here all day and ponder why some albums get the proverbial nod while other, often more deserving ones get buried, but this stellar debut isn’t getting lost in the deluge of 2013 releases if I have anything to say about it. Continue reading “Voices – From the Human Forest Create a Fugue of Imaginary Rain (Candlelight, 2013)”
I haven’t exactly been keeping up with Anaal Nathrakh. Sure, I’ve heard a track here and there over the years, but the last time I actually listened to a full album was 2004’s Domine Non Es Dignus. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in the band, in fact quite the contrary, I absolutely loved the balls-to-the-fucking-wall slab of filth-grinding extremity that was The Codex Necro, and the aforementioned Domine… received a glowing review from yours truly when I was writing for my college paper. But the way Mick Kenney and Dave Hunt continuously crank out albums, especially when the music is so patently assaultive, is extremely overwhelming; I have a hard enough time keeping up with metal as it is. So, here I am revisiting Anaal Nathrakh with Vanitas after missing four full lengths, and damn it feels good to be back. Continue reading “Anaal Nathrakh – Vanitas (Candlelight, 2012)”
I first discovered Corrosion of Conformity during the mid-’90s Pepper Keenan (guitar/vocals) era; by then, they had fully traded in the crossover thrash of 1985’s Animosity album in favor of the swaggering, metallic southern rock of Deliverance and Wiseblood. That’s the COC I had come to know and love over the years, so I was admittedly apprehensive upon hearing that the band had reconvened without Keenan at the helm to record their first new material since 2005’s underrated In the Arms of God. Would they abandon the smoked-out stoner-isms that had made COC so near and dear to my heart in favor of revisiting the crossover days of yore? Would Keenan’s absense leave an unfillable hole in their sound? Continue reading “Corrosion of Conformity – s/t (Candlelight, 2012)”
I find it odd that several prominent (I use the term loosely) metal websites decided to ban coverage of Burzum in response to a recent online rant by Varg Vikernes regarding the shootings and bombing carried out by Norwegian extremist Anders Breivik. Isn’t this ban coming about seventeen years too late? A self-righteous denouncement of Vikernes this point in the game is basically the same as saying “Murder and arson are okay, but hey, we draw the line at hateful remarks!” Of course, I realize that these sites weren’t around back when Vikernes was actually committing crimes, but if they truly found him to be so deplorable, shouldn’t they have banned coverage from the outset based on his actions and not some ineffectual hate-mongering that no one would have paid attention to in the first place had they not drawn attention to it with their sanctimonious grandstanding?
But I digress. I do not wallow in the cesspool of imagined ethical superiority, and therefore have no problem discussing Varg Vikernes’ music. Contrary to what the metal morality police attempt to shove down our throats, it is entirely possible to separate Burzum from its creator’s dodgy politics/beliefs. With that out of the way, it pleases me to say that Varg Vikernes the musician has solidified his “comeback” and proven once and for all that his trailblazing brand of black metal is indeed timeless with Fallen, his second album since being released from prison in 2009.
But what is it that makes Burzum timeless? For me, it’s Vikernes’ guitar playing. His note choices and sense of composition have a hypnotic effect, the very definition of the infamous black metal “trance-out”, a web of spindly, treble-soaked riffage that’s all too easy to get hopelessly lost in. Whenever I listen to Fallen I think of enormous trees, with gnarled, twisted, tangled roots burrowing deep into the soil; it probably has something to do with the earthy, slightly raw guitar tone Vikernes employs here. It gives the album a naturalistic quality that makes the compositions feel as much like folk music as black metal, but without ever degenerating into the silliness that “folk metal” typically implies (perhaps more akin to neofolk?). Of course, black metal at its core has always been a form of folk music, and there are few better suited to uphold that tradition than an outlaw/pariah such as Vikernes, who also happens to be one of the genre’s architects (okay, so maybe you can’t separate the man from the music 100%, oh well).
Speaking of tradition, Fallen was recorded at Grieghallen with production and mixing assistance from Pytten. This studio/producer combination has been responsible for nearly every landmark album in the Norwegian black metal canon (De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, In the Nightside Eclipse, etc) and although only time will tell if Fallen will ever reach the same level of acclaim as those classic recordings, the album does manage to capture a similar vibe without sounding forced or self-consciously retro. This is how black metal is supposed to sound; uninhibited, mesmerizing and totally free from the trappings of modernity.
In addition to showcasing Vikernes’s six-string mastery and benefitting from a strong production scheme, Fallen also represents Burzum at its most compelling from a compositional perspective. If anything, the album comes off as a refinement of the ideas that Vikernes began to explore on Filosofem; the spellbinding repetition, hazy, quasi-psychedelic atmospheres and unique vocal approach have been honed to a fine point. Whereas Filosofem sounded like a collection of experiments (albeit very successful and interesting ones), Fallen sounds like a collection of songs. In this respect, Fallen brings the more experimental qualities of Filosofem together with the sharp yet expansive songwriting style Vikernes brought to the fore on Hvis Lyset Tar Oss. Indeed, the more I listen to Fallen, the more I tend to view 2010’s Belus as a “warm-up” album.
Regardless of what you think of Varg Vikernes the person, it is difficult to deny the significance of Varg Vikernes the musician, especially when he continues to craft such intriguing, vital and relevant work. Fallen just might be the most fully realized Burzum album to date, an elegy for what once was, and a glimmer of hope for the future of the black metal tradition.
Pictured above is one Harold Camping. Creepy looking old fucker, eh? Mr. Camping is the California-based Christian radio broadcaster who started all this Rapture nonsense that we’ve been hearing so much about lately. May 21st, 2011, Camping’s predicted date for when the proverbial shit would hit the fan, has come and gone without any signs of God’s wrath. Turns out the crazy old coot also predicted the end of the world for September 7th, 1994 and has now revised his most recent epic fail for October 21st, 2011 (probably so he could swindle more suckers out of their life savings over the next five months). Give me a fucking break. Nonetheless, it got me thinking, if any of this poppycock were true, what metal albums would I put in heavy rotation in order to ring in the Beginning of The End? After some deliberation and debate standing in front of my CD rack, I chose the following four albums as the soundtrack to the impending Twilight of the Idols.
VON – Satanic Blood Angel (Nuclear War Now! Productions)
San Francisco’s VON only recorded a handful of material during their brief original incarnation, but that material, collected on Satanic Blood Angel, is encoded in the malformed DNA of black metal as we know it. The hypnotic repetition, lo-fi recording quality and themes of Satanism create a blueprint for the genre that is continually being copied, re-shaped and built upon to this day. Black metal is an inherently apocalyptic form of music, so including one of the fountainheads from which the genre sprang is a must for any Armageddon festivities. Unlike a lot of other black metal, VON’s recordings sound genuinely frightening and ritualistic without being comically over-the-top. This is raw, grim ‘n’ gritty stuff that just might be a field recording from the depths of hell, the invocation that begins our march towards oblivion. Pray Satan. Pray Satan. Pray Satan.
Triptykon – Eparistera Daimones (Century Media/Prowling Death)
Tom G. Warrior has been working on crafting the perfect soundtrack to the End of Days for almost three decades. He came close on multiple occasions with Hellhammer and Celtic Frost, but his vision seems to have reached a climax with Triptykon’s Eparistera Daimones. A lurching, heaving leviathan of an album, the Earth shudders under the sheer suffocating heaviness of tracks such as “Abyss Within My Soul” and “Myopic Empire”. Warrior refers to his lyrics as “epistles” (a term typically referring to parts of the Christian Bible’s New Testament which were written as letters to groups of people, i.e. First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, etc), but if anything they are sermons for black masses to be celebrated during the Tribulation. Eparistera Daimones is an utterly draining listen, physically and especially mentally. Prolonged exposure to its haunting blackness could ultimately lead to complete and total erosion of the soul, which might be the only respite from Hell on Earth.
1349 – Revelations of the Black Flame (Candlelight)
For Revelations of the Black Flame, Norway’s 1349 largely abandoned their monotonous, blasting brand of black metal in favor of noise and ambience, creating an utterly polarizing album in the process. Once the initial shock wears off though, the soundscapes 1349 conjure here slowly begin to seep out of the speakers and infest your ears, worming their way into your soul. It’s none too surprising that Tom G. Warrior also had a hand in the recording, as the claustrophobic blackness here is very similar to that of Triptykon and latter-day Celtic Frost, although the material on Revelations… is much more adventurous in its execution. It’s no mere coincidence that Revelation is the hallucinatory book of the New Testament in which the Apostle John describes the Apocalypse, because while some call this album 1349’s nadir, I call it their first (and so far only) foray into a sound that is utterly deranged, horrific and esoteric, a perfectly sublime sonic accompaniment to Ragnarok if ever there was one.
Godflesh – Streetcleaner (Earache)
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” The quotation is from George Orwell’s 1984, but it perfectly sums up Godflesh’s 1989 debut album, the monolithically heavy Streetcleaner. The recording is the equivalent of having your skull marched over by a thousand dirt and blood-caked mechanical boots, while visions of a world irrevocably scarred by over-population, urban blight, unchecked greed and absolute power corrupting absolutely run through it. The crushing, metronomic pulse of the drum machine gives the album a soulless, mechanical vibe, while the grimy distortion of the guitar and bass, as well as Justin Broadrick’s beastly vocals, are undeniably human; the sounds of mankind struggling against the onset of subjugation via technology, only to be crushed under its aforementioned heel. Regular readers will remember that I recently used almost identical imagery to describe a trio of forward thinking Norwegian black metal albums. Streetcleaner is a direct precursor to those recordings and its apocalyptic visions are far more terrifying than any hellfire ‘n’ brimstone sermon, precisely because it is rooted in the all too tangible realities of our everyday world.
Of course the sad thing is that twenty or thirty years ago, before the of the internet, social networking and all the other platforms we now have in place for wackadoos to advertise their messages of moronitude (yes, I made that word up) across the globe, Harold Camping would only be known as California radio’s local nutcase for Christ. Articles such as this one wouldn’t be necessary because Camping would be a regional footnote at best. But regardless of what you think of faux-doomsday prophecies and whether or not the universe implodes, I think you’ll find these four albums well worth your time (though hopefully you’ve already explored at least some of them). If nothing else, they prove that Satan has the best tunes, even on Judgement Day.
THKD 