Nostalgia in viking disguise

Viking Crown - Contemplating the pitch back (mp3)
Viking Crown's MySpace page
I have to admit - I feel kind of childish, when I start to think, how much time I spend to black metal. But at least I'm not so childish, that I could get into viking metal (then again, Bathory's "Hammerheart" is an excellent work, but then suddenly some bands began to take it too seriously and things went very wrong). When I first heard about Viking Crown, I was quite suspicious. I didn't know exactly what to expect, so I managed to overcome my prejudice and I gave it a chance.
As it goes with each style of music, there are always some certain bands or artists, which later gain the fame of being taken as important predecessors. When it comes to black metal, one of those bands is Hellhammer, later known as Celtic Frost. My taste of music has always had sort of nostalgic value. It's a strange thing - old things always seem to be better. The leader of American trio Viking Crown was Phil Anselmo from Pantera. I'm surprised, because there isn't much connection with black metal here, you know. But it seems that Phil Anselmo is also very nostalgic about black metal. This song captures perfectly that sweet lost essence of old days, when some unknown trio called Hellhammer made history in cellar somewhere in Switserland. It's not an easy thing to achieve.

Musical competitors of Coffin Joe

Stalaggh - excerpt from "Projekt Terror" (mp3)
Interview
When listening to Abruptum I had often thought - why is it, that this kind of psychedelic improvisations are so rare in black metal. It isn't hard to come up with something like that, you know. And I had always dreamed, that things could be much more psychedelic, still without loosing that special raw touch of BM. But when I heard Stalaggh my dream had come true.
Stalaggh is black noise project from Holland. All the musicians behind that have remained strictly anonymous, they don't have even pseudonyms and it's unknown how many members there actually are. But it's said that they are all more or less known artists in dutch and belgian industrial and BM scene. Stalaggh has recorded two albums - fully improvised jam sessions called "Projekt Nihil" and "Projekt Terror". Both of these have only one track, which lasts over 30 minutes.
Among all the other negative and disturbing emotions, I guess one meaning of this audio experiment is to give some idea about the mental state of criminally insane. Probably the most curious fact about Stalaggh is that they have cooperated with a bunch of real insane asylum patients.I must admit, that this thing really is effective. When I have listened it long enough, this starts to manipulate my feelings. It infects with the need to do something aggressive and stupidly selfdestructive, like smashing my head against the wall, for example. It's like Jose Mojica Marins' movie "The strange hostel of naked pleasures", where all the characters are just running around in the campily decorated hotel and seeing creepy surreal visions. Something like a neverending horrible LSD nightmare.
The music itself is a dynamic mess of screaming and moaning madmen, fuzzy rumbling sounds, guitar noise and occasionally appearing slow riffs. Of course it demands strong nerves and a lot of patience to listen the whole stuff, but it isn't so boring as it might sound. From time to time things change, there are culminations with high tension and there are more monotonous or fragile moments. The best thing done yet in black-noise subgenre
(This sound clip doesn't give much idea of what Stalaggh really is, but it's the only one I found from the web.)

Zombies of Satanic concentration camp

Blackdeath - Satan macht mich frei (mp3)
Blackdeath is a duo from Russia, St. Petersburg. I like their "Satan macht frei" album very much, but there isn't nothing weird in this music. It makes me a bit confused. When I search for new music, I usually pick one random song from the album and when this doesn't hit me during the first minute, I leave it there. These decisions come very quickly. There has to be something really unordinary or authentic, when I want to listen the whole album. For me this Blackdeath's album is something very unordinary, because I usually don't want to listen traditional black metal. I guess that the specific atmosphere of this music makes it so special. The production is quite strange. Guitar is the most dominant - like constant sharp buzzing of chainsaw. The drums are hidden somewhere deep in the mix. You can't almost here them, but only sense them. But it's not bad production at all, it's just unique and different. And the vocals are emotionless and inhuman. It's not about screaming your head off in meaningless anger. It's more like a monotonous raven croaking than a human voice. It's cold and numb music made by totally stoned zombies. This unique sound makes the music also interesting, because if there were an average sound, probably this music would be really boring also. But the longer it lasts, the better it gets. It makes a big difference to listen just one song or the whole album.
"Satan macht frei". I take it as a paraphrase of notorious nazy slogan on the gates of concentration camps - "Arbeit macht frei". I guess this means that we are dealing here with some Satanic concentration camps. Cool ! Listen this while watching Alain Resnais "Night and fog".

Death chants through vocoder

L'acephale - Heartless and miserable (mp3)
L'acephale on MySpace
L'acephale means "Headless" in french, it was some secret society in 30's, but the band is from USA. If I had to pick a name for their style, it would be Nuclear War Ambient Black Metal. Blackmetal songs here are painfully distorted, fast, aggressive and monotonous. Speedy blastbeating drums are very robotic. Everything is buried in high frequency buzz, sometimes the drums sound as if somebody is numbly hammering the metal plates. It's even more than just mean distortion, it's done with bad production. And it's not that kind of bad that sounds cool, it's just hard to listen. They use probably drum machine. The vocals are also heavily distorted. It's hard to point out the bass because the vocals and guitars are so harsh, but on the low end there's most of the time an one note synthesizer bassline. All together it makes a painful wall of noise, but simple harmonies are still evident somehow. This goes for the BM songs on this album. It's an angry and uncompromising work, but if it would be just that, I would not bother to write about it here. Thankfully things are a bit more varied with L'acephale.
The other half of the material is some kind of darkfolk nuclear war mood music. These endlessly repeating acoustic guitar parts with battlefield noise, distant explosions and operatic female vocal samplings in the background create effectively very hypnotic atmospheres. In one point I totally forgot that there was music playing. I was staring some pointless russian sports channel from TV and I actually realized it several minutes later. Sometimes, after 10 or 15 minutes distorted guitars slowly enter. This connects those slow acoustic and sharp metal parts into one epic story. One of the most interesting tracks on album "Mord und totschlag" is "Heartless and miserable". Acoustic guitar riffs played in slow and monotonous solid rhythm, and a voice of a grim monk filtered through something very close to vocoder! Indeed, nicely surprising idea.
(This picture here isn't L'acephale. I found it from the website of some Hungarian band Öröm. But I thought that this image of death playing Yamaha synthesizer fits perfectly with L'acephale's music).

Statement of unoriginality

War - Bombenhagel (mp3)
War (also known as Total War) was a swedish supergroup of members from Abruptum, Dark Funeral and Hypocrisy. I don't know if this is meant to be so, but War is Spinal Tap of black metal. It's the ultimate cliche of swedish type of BM a'la Marduk. All the musicians here are very skilled and the studio production is nice and clean, but the music and lyrics are so unbelievably primitive, that it has to be a joke. This song here is Sodom cover and a little bit more interesting than the averarage War track (especially the outro - theme of "Deutschland über alles"). The song titles go like this - "War", "We are war", "Total war", "The sons of war", "Soldiers of Satan", "Ave Satan", "Kill god", "666", "Hell", "Revenge" etc., etc. And the music is the same as the song titles - short tracks based on the most typical riffs and rhythms you could ever find. It's music done with absolutely no creative ambitions. In this way it's pretty amusing - even the most untalented musicians try to put some thought in their creation, but this project is based on radical unoriginality!

Opera singer doing Burzum karaoke

Urfaust - Verflucht das blenden der erscheinung (mp3)
Urfaust - Skogens hatefulle skapning (mp3)
Urfaust on MySpace
Urfaust from Holland tends to be my favourite band among the newcomers in evergrowing BM scene. This trio does primitive yet epic mid-tempo black metal and contemporary classical orchestral compositions. The black metal songs have that typical dungeon reverb and the feeling is powerful and solid as in the ballads of Aerosmith. The structures are simple and repetitive. There's some sort of noiserock twist in the approach to guitars, Urfaust uses feedback sounds and other noises that appear when doing lo-fi recordings in an artistic way to create specific atmosphere. I love that track where guitarist uses minimalistically flanger effect during the whole song. As Akitsa, Urfaust has a very experimental feel in their music, it's that kind of experimental like early Sonic Youth.
But the most outstanding part of Urfaust is the vocal. There's an appropriate description on the Aquarius Records website (by the way, it's a good place to look for eccentric black metal). It goes something like this : imagine a deliriously drunk german opera singer performing karaoke with an early Burzum song. The vocal is mostly clean and it reminds Fenriz's vocals on Isengard's albums, but Urfaust does it in much more eccentric way. But that singer can also do the most manic BM shrieking. In Ildjarn cover (from "Under the banner of strength and anger - hommage to Ildjarn") the vocals are as insane as the euphoric howling of Leatherface when attacking with a chainsaw.
And then there are orchestral works. Sometimes with vocals, but mostly instrumental and the instruments sure sound as genuine strings and horns. And there's a nice concert hall reverb to make things even more authentic. There must be some academical background in doing such arrangements. But I'm still amazed that some guys performing raw and dirty black metal are able to do it. It's understandable that Frank Zappa or John Zorn have done orchestral works, but how could THIS happen ?? These tracks are made in such high professional level, that when I would compare them with for example Alfred Schnittke's compositions, I couldn't make difference in quality. "Geist ist teufel" reminds me a lot Arvo Pärt's "Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten".

Fuck off nowadays black metal

Nargaroth - Black metal ist krieg (mp3)
Nargaroth on MySpace
Nargaroth - german one-man-band of Kanwulf , is not musically very experimental. It's fast scandinavian style BM in it's finest, but nothing out of the the average. Still, it's one of the few german BM acts, who has remained loyal to raw old school style through all these years, so it has proudly gained it's place among the so called true bands.But I find it still interesting, because the lyrical topics are sometimes original and quite amusing. As you may have already noticed, I prefer black metal to be structurally as simple as possible, so I chose a track where short verse is basically repeated all over and over again (in lyrics also, it's like a suggestion chanting).
The album "Black metal ist krieg (A dedication monument)" tells the story about black metal itself. It's about the events that happened in scandinavia in the beginning of the nineties. The burning churches and murders in the inner circle etc. And there are tribute songs to the leading figures of that scene. Nargaroth has also demo titled "Fuck off nowadays black metal".

Baron von Swine

Von - Watain (mp3)
Swine - Black soul king (mp3)
Von's MySpace page
American trio Von was a short but important phenomenon in the beginning of the nineties. Their only official record is the compilation "Satanic blood angel", which was released 10 years after the band had already split up. Von is easily the earliest cult BM act from USA, because when they existed, there simply wasn't anybody else exploring that field in The States. And still there aren't any bands who could do it better in this simple but uniquely effective way. Von had easily recognizable songwriting style, which followed simple strong rules. The songs, always short and straight forward like grindcore, had very few simple riffs and the chanting vocal rhythm was like barking of the dog. But unlikely to some other groups, who mixed grindcore and black metal (Beherit, Blasphemy) in the early nineties, Von's music never became chaotic and blurry. It was some sort of old ascetic way of doing black metal, like Terrorizer did grindcore.

Lately I discovered an album "Marked by the baron", done by an english one-man-band Swine in 2004. As said in liner notes, this album is inspired and dedicated to Von. The first time I listened to it, I didn't know about that, and Swine sounded like something fresh, yet familiar. And that's how it is. Swine has taken a lot from Von, but has it's own original way of interpreting it. Firstly, the sound is much more colourful than the bleak demo recording of Von. And there is that reverbed clean guitar with simple slow melodies always in the main focus.
Here you can compare old Von and new Swine. One of them is a definitive classic, the other is a successful modern interpretation. Both highly recommended.

Invert the inverted cross !

Horde - Behold, the rising of the scarlet moon (mp3)
Horde on MySpace
Horde is an one-man-project of Jason Sherlocke from Australia. "Hellig usvart" ("Holy unblack" in norwegian) was released somewhere in the middle of the nineties and was Horde's only album. Man made his statement and that was it. I think that this is THE MOST controversial conceptual album ever made in black metal. It's christian black metal fueled with pure hatred against satanism. It's like excorcism, like performing blasphemy on blasphemy. "Invert the inverted cross" - now is that a cool song title, or what? The goal was to piss off the scandinavian blackmetallers and he succeeded quite nicely, he even got some death threats. Behind the project was the drummer of Australian christian death metal group Mortification. If there were normal BM lyrics, this would be one of the most respected raw BM albums, right next to Darkthrone's "Under the funeral moon". It's amazing how skillfully this guy has imitated the production and style. And it's far beyond just imitating, it's outstanding how an outsider to the scene has reached such high level only available to the very top visionaires of the genre. Even the ascetic black and white album sleeve is as the tradition demands. But due to lyrics most of the black metal fans avoid it intentionally and this record is almost like forgotten nowadays. Horde has given inspiration to some other christian metal bands, but these are just average mostly symphonic BM groups not worth mentioning

Fresh tea !?

Furze - Fresh tea! (mp3)
Furze is an one-man-band (what else) of Woe J. Reaper from Norway. I have tried to get into his music, but I just can't get any connection with it, no matter how hard I try. The songs are long and slow. The compositions are really hard to follow and the playing is clumsy, so all the time I'm unconsciously waiting for the next mistake to come. I don't know, sometimes those mistakes are so obvious that it seems even intentional, that's not a bad thing at all. Composing ugly metal and making it even more ugly by playing it badly - that's an interesting point of view, but still most of the time it's very disturbing.
There are some riffs which remind early Black Sabbath, all the time it feels that now something is going to happen, but it's endlessly stuck, like aimlessly wandering in the labyrinth. The vocals are very varied, there arent much growling or shrieking , but chaotic weird mumbling and random howls. The lyrical themes are very cryptic. It's like an one-man religion, with strange selfmade terms. I read an interview, but I still don't understand half of the things he was trying to explain.
Furze uses typical image of black metal. Corpsepaint, black leather clothes, spikes, snowy desolate landscapes and the whole package, but the strange thing is that the music is actually some sort of old school doom. With an atmosphere and production of primitive BM, but still far from all the combinations of black metal available (it's not black doom, like Nortt, for example).
Anyway, there is one very different song on the "First feast of freedom" EP. Furze has always done whatever comes to mind (too bad, that there just ain't much more than those doomy riffs and funny vocals) with no need for explanations. I don't know what made him to do this strange song, but I don't think that it's about drinking tea.

Hang the priest's head!

Enbilulugugal - Totalitarian faggotaxe slaughter (mp3)
Enbilulugugal - Raped by mammoth (mp3)
As you already must have understood, these reviews aren't about good and beautiful music. With nihilistic black noise band Enbilulugugal, it's obvious that they are desperately trying to sound as ugly, stupid and annoying as imaginable. The pseudonyms (Alcoholonomicon, Coprophiliac), the song titles, handmade album covers. Be my guest, it's always better to take this attitude, than to make average black metal. I wish all those pointless bands infesting the scene would have started from here. If normal metalheads had to play this music, they probably would never want to touch their instruments again.
It isn't necessary to be a romantic narrowminded satanist to make black metal band, you know. Enbilulugugal is more of a nihilistic noise-grind band, who has chosen the imagery of BM. They sound like Beherit done by Seth Putnam. It's nothing but swarming mass of distortion. It's impossible to separate the instruments from each other in this wall of noise. And all the time there is that distorted wordless howling. But at least, it never falls apart in pieces, this noise is always tight and massive.

About black noise

Black noise is the most radical and openminded subgenre in black metal. Don't mistake it with just awfully noisy and fast black metal. The main difference is that black noise is mostly based on free improvised compositions. I think the stimulus of doing it, is to get some kind of experience in the vein of kaos magick rituals - searching for higher conscious by clearing the mind from conventional thoughts and acting illogically ( there's a good example - destroying something you really need or love - let's say, throwing your TV out of the window, is a simple act of kaos magick).
There are bands like Vibracathedral Orchestra, No Neck Blues Band, Kemialliset Ystävät etc. - so called new psychedelia movement in nowadays experimental rock music. And there are drone/sludge bands like Earth, Khanate, Sunn O)) etc. in doom metal. Black noise is a parallel phenomenon of those things in black metal genre. Unlikely to countless sludge and new psychedelia bands, pure black noise is still very hard thing to find. A lot of alternatively thinking metal groups have done experiments in this field (even in Estonia there was a death metal band Rattler, who made some very psychedelic noise compositions in their concerts in the middle of the nineties), but bands who are fully dedicated to black noise are quite rare . Preserving the oldschool traditions has always had it's value and that kind of fundamental changes are probably not easy to come.

Kaotic chunks of unknown origin

Bakbakwalanooksiwae - Le grand khan rouge (mp3)
Blasphemy - one of the rawest and oldest black/grind groups came from Canada. I know nothing else about the tradition of Canadian blackmetal, but it seems that some of the most bizarre acts in nowadays BM are coming from this country. Bakbakwalanooksiwae is certainly one of them, a truly enjoyable experience of unbelievable mindfuck. First thing that caught my attention was of course the name - it means "Great Cannibal at the North End of the Earth" in native american mythology. And it's said that the victims of this creature become cultureless and languageless in it's belly .
This is one-man-project of Trepas from Quebec, created in 2002. He calls his music "chaos ritual black metal". There is only one split album with a band called Antikriist. (Release of a demo "Freudian black metal" has been canceled. The reason for that is unknown to me, but I just had to mention it, because of the really cool title.) I have heard only two songs, these are available on Bakbakwalanooksiwae's website. But these tracks convinced me, that this band must be the weirdest thing ever happened in BM. At least my imagination can't get any further. It's monotonous and massive and psychedelic wall of noise dominated by very low frequencies. The sound is slightly reminiscent to some goregrind bands, but I don't know, it's not actually metal. It isn't experimental industrial noise either. It's hard to describe, because there simply isn't anything to compare it with. If somebody who has never heard any metal or rock music, but still would try to make it in a very extreme way - maybe that's how it sounds. Strange looping rhythms sound like somebody is beating together wooden sticks. Ridiculously low tuned growling vocals. I guess most of the music is made with computer, because it just sounds so unearthly, still it lacks the typical sterile and anonymous touch, which comes with computer music. There aren't any melodies or even guitars, but some sort of repetitive chunks of unknown origin. This description as "chaos ritual BM" might be the right place to look for answers, because the dadaistic mysticism of chaos magic is strongly present here. There isn't much going on in this music, it's about being stuck in just one strange state of mind, but it still makes me more than happy, that somebody has the guts to do something so unorthodox in black metal.

Caveman's dream

Blodulv - Famine pulse (mp3)
Blodulv is not so old (formed in 2002) trio from Göteborg, Sweden. But their music sounds as it was made in the middle of nineties in Norway. I think this can be called the second coming of primitive garage black metal. The sound is massive and dirty. The vocals are very raw, it sounds as if the vocalist is having a race in being noisy with the rest of the band. The vocal isn't that high shrieking a'la Burzum, it's similar to Darkthrone, but a bit out of balance, buried in the noise of overamplified microphone.
For me the ultimate highlight of BM genre is Darkthrone's album "Transilvanian Hunger". Things just can't get closer to perfection. With this album Darkthrone crossed the boundaries of being just a blackmetal group. There are some highly original artists who have reached the musical perfection, no matter what genre they are representing - for example Prince, The Smiths, Giorgio Moroder etc. And Darkthrone's "Transilvanian Hunger" is one of them.
I'm telling this because Blodulv's songwriting reminds me a lot of that Darkthrone album.I know, there must be thousands of bands, that are trying to copy Darkthrone, but none of them is worth mentioning. Blodulv doesn't sound like it's out there to copy Darkthrone. It reminds Darkthrone just because it has it's roots in the old-school black metal. I mean there is no sense in blaming Darkthrone about copying Hellhammer, but there are obvious influences.
I'm talking about Blodulv's "Diatribe EP" from 2005. It's much much slower, but it has the same ascetic monotony. There are no intros, no acoustic parts, no special effects, not even guitar solos. Just verse-chorus-verse-chorus-verse... . Or only one verse played alternately in tremolo and slower chords followed by different drum rhythms. Or one verse played in different keys. It's that kind of simplicity that has it's own value. Less is more - you know. This structure reminds me primitive country or blues, it's like storytelling. The things that catch the attention are atypical time signatures. Another thing here, which I like in BM, is when the melodies aren't so straightly on minor scale. The music isn't happy and optimistic, of course, but it isn't as furious as Darkthrone (again) or as pessimistic as Burzum. In it's own controversial way it's even romantic. Like a caveman's dream or something. Blodulv isn't an oddball outsider band as many of those reviewed on this site, it's just a nice example of things done with a fresh touch. Sometimes this is just enough, when listening to metal.

First we take Merzbow, then we take some folk...

Dead Raven Choir - First we take Manhattan (mp3)
Dead Raven Choir on MySpace
Dead Raven Choir is an one-man-band of Smolken. He was born in Poland, now he lives and creates music in the US. I don't know if he has any black metal background, but all the rest of the music of Dead Raven Choir, except some mini-albums, are not black metal at all. It's some kind of depressive and eccentric singer/songwriter-type of folkmusic. Like a mixture of Nick Cave and Tower Recordings.

Of course,this Leonard Cohen cover here isn't ordinary black metal either. And for sure, it isn't a joke Guitars, grim voice, no percussion and huge amount of distortion. It's produced like the most cruel and infernal black noise. It's unlistenable! Even now when I'm posting it, I have to consider a long time, do I really have to suffer and listen it. Like before the visit to the dentist, I have to focus my thoughts on something beautiful and secure (that's in case you have rotten teeth and you are afraid of the dentist of course). But it's effective shock therapy. After listening this, it's really good to be in silence for some minutes and all the common background noises, like distant traffic, birds singing and kids playing in the backyard sound just beautiful.
Beware! Turn the volume down before the listening!

I's infected with black thrash

Coldness - Nothing in the mirror (mp3)
This one-man-project of Nocturnus Horrendus from Portugal has set it's goal to make as sick and evil black metal as possible. Nevermind, that's what they all say, Coldness is noisy old school BM with an unique 80s garage thrash twist. This creates nice nostalgic feelings. It's always a good thing that there are bands who are keeping the true oldschool traditions alive. Besides usual tremolo playing, there are a lot of chunky thrashing guitar riffs in each song, that's the trademark of Coldness. But I think none of the eighties black-thrash bands were ever so noisy. The drums are powerful and pounding, the vocal and guitar are so painfully sharp, that it's impossible to listen it loudly with headphones.

There is a strange schizophrenic concept in the lyrics. Don't know for sure, but seems that it's about split personalities. There are song titles as "I destroyed the I", "One minus one" and "Me and of my I's". And "Nothing in the mirror" is also cool. Like a title for a b-movie about vampires. There is one special and really scary detail in this track. I don't know why it's there, probably just some kind of defect, but if you listen carefully, in some random point in the end of the song somebody says suddenly with a calm voice: "Cuckoo!". It comes so unexpectedly, that each time I just can't help but look over my shoulder.

Guys! This sounds really evil, let's drink some more

Dead Reptile Shrine - Bones in the dungeon (mp3)
Dead Reptile Shrine is an obscure band from Finland with three anonymous members. They are telling on their website, that they have done all kind of different experiments in music with all kind of exciting conceptions - electronic ambient, field recordings, acoustic stuff etc. Well, I 've heard only this compilation "Journey through the darkest forests" and there ain't much more than black metal.
I can't say it's interesting, nor is it good, actually it's really bad, but on this level, which is already almost good. It sounds exactly like a bunch of heavily drunken low-lifes wasting time in a rehearsal room, trying to sound really evil. It's the same excitement, when watching "The funniest home videos", fat neighbour falling in the pool or something. It may be a real refreshing experience when listening next to Emperor or Satyricon, but very soon after that it gets simply boring (my god! this compilation is 70 minutes long)

Having fun !

Vondur - Love me tender (mp3)
Vondur at Myspace
Vondur may not be so special musically, but it's still a phenomenon. It's a side project of Swedish black metal terror duo Abruptum. It's some sort of black metal version of Weird Al Yankovic.

Even the insiders of the scene realize sometimes how ridiculous things get with being "kvlt" and "troo". So the case here is to go over-the -top grotesque. Album cover of Vondur's first LP was like a Star Wars movie poster - huge figure of Darth Vader and his lazer sword in the center. I chose a song from their following MCD "Galactic rock & roll empire". It's an interpretation of classic Elvis Presley hit. There are also cover versions of Judas Priest and Mötley Crüe on that record. Vondur wears yellow corpsepaint and in interviews they manifest nothing but total war and destruction of mankind. I think that people who find this funny, must have quite poor sense of humour. Anyway this is all on the very edge of bad taste. But the music is not so bad at all. It's fast, chaotic and aggrssive as hell. When listening to Abruptum, it seems that these guys are just too stoned to handle their instruments. But Vondur proves that they are actually very good musicians. It's much better than all those wannabe idiots who can't even copy properly the true black metal. There are also some parody bands, who are making just boring black metal, but try to be ironic by making those worn off penguin jokes in their lyrics. That's not the case here. I take Vondur as some higher form of nihilism, they don't have respect even for the genre they are supposed to represent. But antagonistically Vondur has the essence of black metal, because true BM is all about selfdestruction and nihilism, right?

Wagnerian nekro tekno

Vorak - Blood reich 2000 (mp3)
Vorak - Elsa's traum (mp3)
Vorak is from Australia. He has studied in conservatory and his favourite composer and idol is Richard Wagner. This may just be the worst thing ever done in BM. But for those who like outsider music, this should be a real treasure. It's amazing how wrong sometimes things get in the mind of some madmen. In this sense I find it seriously, absolutely cosmically funny stuff.
Vorak is doing complexed BM symphonies. There are a lot of romantic Richard Clayderman-style interludes played on piano. This sounds like mechanical piano played by a malfunctioning robot. But he probably thinks that he's a reincarnation of Wagner (these tracks are taken from the album titled "Rhetoric of the supermen"and his previous album was called "The triumph of the will" !). It's funny how he has really wanted to create something powerful and beautiful. The problem is that he uses a primitive computer program with the cheapest, most sterile sounds available. All the instruments sound so retardedly false as ever possible. It's like Super Mario black metal. But still he claims, that he has used Steinway grand piano !?
He has sold his soul to Satan to play as fast as Yngwie Malmsteen, but then again he has ruined it all with his bizarre arrangements. I remember once there was a digital sounding BM band Parnassus, the music had a cheap easy-going orchestrated baroque feeling. It was like an euro-trance black metal, but at least the rhythms were nicely flowing. Compared to this, Vorak's arrangements go as easily as a wheelchair up the stairs. The vocals are tuned so ridiculously high, that it sounds like a lament of a small baby. "The triumph of the bad taste".

The American way

Krieg - A process of dying (mp3)
Krieg - Venus in furs (mp3)
Krieg on MySpace
Krieg was a second wave old school BM cult group from USA. Formed in the late nineties they released their last album just a few months ago. Krieg's music is never too experimental in the sense of being utterly strange, but there's always something pure and authentic, it's easy to take it as it is. Krieg has a short conceptual mini-album "Patrick Bateman EP" . There are only two identical songs - just one repetitious blastbeat rhythm and almost unmelodical mass of distorted guitars - plus spoken text interludes taken from the movie "American Psycho".There's something specially american in Krieg. Not only that they have made this tribute to the most charming American antihero. It's that independent rock'n'roll feeling - doing your thing, enjoying it and not caring what others think about it. For example "A process of dying" - it's just great headbanging rock'n'roll tune with superb energy, no need for conceptualizing it with extra ideologies. This instrumental track is based on simple five-note melody. The rhythm is precise as a clockwork and fast as ... I don't know, hmm, some very fast car. Then the guitar solo starts. And on top of that another guitar solo. And another and another... Finally there are about five solos in the same time and it gets so intensive, that it all falls in a disoriented mess of distortion and feedback. And that Velvet Underground cover - I can't remember any other black metal band who has ever made serious interpretations of something else than just death- or black metal songs. It's an artificially derived thought, but when you take VU's "White light, white heat" with it's droning monotonous rhythm, repetitive patterns and ugly lo-fi sound it's not so far from the aesthetics of primitive black metal.
As an example of healthy attitude, here's what these guys tell to the crowd in the end of the concert: "May you all die in automobile accidents on the way home! Fuck you, we are Krieg!"

Attention BM passengers! Next stop Shoegaze

Velvet Cacoon - When the purest flesh is alive in a heart full of hate (mp3)
Velvet Cacoon - There are sixteen bridges in Portland (but only one leads to a haven) (mp3)
Velvet Cacoon on MySpace
This mystic group from The United States is ideologically and musically something very unusual in black metal. There are 8 members and seven of them are women. It's more of a romantic anti-socialite culture club than a band, because only some of them actively participate in making music. In the beginning they spread all kind of false rumours - that they belong in an ecoterroristic group, that they use guitar which functions on gasoline and have done paranormal recordings. The newest rumours have been, that they practice sexual absistence and are doing experiments with heavy drugs.
For almost a decade now they have done introvert ambient-like black metal. Because of the following I would even call it shoegaze black metal:
When I come up with such comparisons, I wonder how would it sound when a band representing , let's say, surfrock would do something in very opposite direction - IDM electronica, for example. I know some examples in metal music. Anal Cunt has done a mini-album "Picnic of love" with acoustic ballads and another grind band Exit-13 has an album "Smoking songs" - this is lounge music from the 30s. (These are not good examples, because A.C and Exit-13 have done this just to get out of their routine for a moment, but I couldn't find any other. )
Now Velvet Cacoon has made this step, like through teleportation they have moved from black metal to shoegaze indie. It seems, that they had been planning it all the time. It's not a mix of different styles. Nothing but dreamy soundscapes in the vein of My Bloody Valentine or Cocteau Twins here. Pure shoegaze record, even a good one!

Pure genius! No talent allowed!

Ildjarn - Utsyn, del 4 (mp3)
Ildjarn at Myspace
Attention! Now this is something really important. Forget Darkthrone or Burzum.If you want to get an idea about the genuine harsh garage black metal ,you have to know one-man-band of Ildjarn (real name Vidar Vaaer) from Norway. It seems that he has found a perfect formula and his repeating it in every possible combination. The songs are usually quite short, less than 3 minutes and there are about 20 tracks on each album. The structures are extremely simple, mostly that common verse-chorus type. Sometimes the songs are instrumental and sometimes there's only bass guitar and drums. And sometimes there are even identical riffs in different songs, just played in different tempos. But the riffs are always catchy and easy to get into. The recording quality is as awfully noisy as it can get. There is nothing fancy about it - no echoes or reverbs to make it more atmospheric. Usually the songs start by clicking the drum sticks together, as it is a tradition in hardcore punk, then the melodies are repeated just long enough to get the idea and in the end the song is cut in a random point. Ildjarn's records sound like collections of direct ideas, it seems that whenever he comes up with a new riff, he just pushes the button on his 4-track and makes a documentation.
The lyrics aren't religious, no "praise satan" stuff here. Maybe a little in the vein of new-age, about pagan nature worshipping, but it's all delivered in a very personal and intimate way. Ildjarn gets inspiration by walking in the wild nature. In interviews he has mentioned that he tryes to avoid other people as much as possible. So here we have a true autistic misanthrope. But he's a vegetarian and he loves animals.

How about some folkloric necro metal?

Sort Vokter - Gralysning (mp3)
Sort Vokter was a short time project of the musicians from different underground BM groups from Norway in the middle of the nineties. Only one album "Folkloric necro metal" (what a name!) has been released. One of the members was Ildjarn and it seems that he was also the main composer. Sort Vokter is similar to Ildjarn in many ways. It's simplistic and repetitive and the riffs are catchy, but the sound isn't so uncompromisingly harsh. Sometimes when there are atmospheric synths in background, it's almost beautiful. This instrumental track here is like primitive folk music. First verse, second verse, first verse, second verse - It could go on forever. And there isn't any need for screaming all the time. Like in Ildjarn's music, the topics here seem to be a little more obscure than average . Of course, there's always something aggressive, depressive or rebellious in metal. And making songs about chaotic and seemingly hostile forces of nature is nothing new in black metal, but when listening to Sort Vokter the feeling is somehow different. It's like capturing the excitement of being in survival camp.

Burzum vs Bunkur

BUNKUR - Erblicket die töchter des firmanents (Burzum cover)
Bunkur is from Holland, and they are doing sludge doom, not black metal. (By the way, an artist who made the logo of Bunkur, has also made album designs for Urfaust.) But this song, a slow hypnotic tune fits fine to the category. After all it's supposed to be a cover of Burzum, although I can't remember this song from Burzum's albums. Maybe it's too loosely interpreted, but also I haven't listened Burzum for years now. The instrumentation is slightly unusual. I can't hear any guitar here, only heavy buzzing bass. The vocals are strongly distorted, thin and very distant. The best part is the drummers work with cymbals. Drums have massive and lush reverb. Together with the dirty bassguitar this envokes an atmosphere of a big abandoned factory.
This is an example of not too common combination of modern sludge/drone doom and black metal.

Death match of gluesniffers

Beherit - Dawn of Satan's millenium (mp3)
Beherit on MySpace
Beherit was one of the most radical finnish bands, they made grinding black metal in the beginning of the nineties. It's close to the music of canadian group Blasphemy, but even more noisy and chaotic. And it's widely known as one of the early classics of underground BM. It's an obligatory history lesson for all the metalheads. You just can't find that kind of freshly naive and brutal bands today anymore. So I still felt, that a short reminder may be appropriate.

Then Beherit suddenly turned into ritualistic darkwave synth music. This was indeed better than similar things done by Burzum, but not as good and stylish as Neptune Towers. Nowadays one of Beherit's members is still exploring electronic music with project called Suuri Shamaani. It's extremely minimalistic as Alvin Lucier's "Music on a long thin wire" or something, but in a sadly anonymous way. Listening to this made me think, that I'm just wasting my time.

So I'm talking about Beherit's first album - "The oath of black blood". Once, in the middle of the nineties, when I first discovered black metal, this was a bit too extreme for my ears. After all, it's really hard to keep tracking down some melodylines in this awful mess. It's like a death match of musical instruments with bad production ( Turbo Records made an illegal copy straight from the demo tape and released it in 1991.) But I had to respect their dedication of making so extremely sick and brutal music. Beherit was three frustrated teenagers obsessed with dirty glam of satanism. It's all about having fun, wearing corpsepaint and t-shirts with the logos of underground cult bands nobody has heard before, drinking a lot and sniffing glue, then doing some graveyard rituals at midnight, pissing on graves, sacrificing cats, vomiting blood... When I think about Beherit, I think about the characters from the film "Gummo".

True misanthropic nationalists

Akitsa - Nationalisme misanthropique (mp3)
Akitsa - Prophetie heretique (mp3)
Akitsa on MySpace

Akitsa comes from Quebec. There are two members and they both play guitars and drums alternately. I'm aware of how false this may sound, considering that all the bands in BM scene are trying to be true and genuine (it has a lot in similar with rap music actually), but Akitsa has UNDERGROUND written all over it. It's uncompromisingly raw and primitive, but experimental at the same time.

With song structures Akitsa keeps things as simple as possible. Usually there aren't more than four or five riffs, sometimes only two. The drum beats are repetitive and don't change during the whole song. But those riffs and beats are well chosen and there are a lot of interesting combinations. I'm getting a bit too excited now, but it's like Steve Reich playing garage punk. And even if there is a solo it's just repeating one pattern. It's a matter of taste, a lot of listeners probably find it too simple. But I like it how they are avoiding all those typical rhythm fills and chord changes. It's obviously intentional, Akitsa's views are much wider than anybody would expect from a garage band. They have done marchial sound collages that remind me NON from the period of "In the shadow of the sword" (Hymne a la guerre on "Soleil Noir"). They have also done some acoustic stuff, this could be called dark-folk, but that style usually never gets so dirty. Akitsa doesn't care if some clumsy mistakes happen during the playing. And the sound is a true earcandy for the fans of lo-fi recordings. It's extremely raw and loud, fueled with adrenaline. All the instruments are overamplified and there's a lot of feedback noise. They have a lot of punk-rock attitude and the music is very punkish too. With bands like Akitsa it's really hard to describe that blackmetal essence in them. I mean there's much more in it, than just those inhuman vocals and grim frosty landscapes on record sleeves. This music is NECRO. There are punk and psychobilly bands singing about graveyard parties - The Misfits and The Meteors for example, but their music is full of life energy and excitement - this is not necro. But the overwhelming nihilism, despair and straight panic in Akitsa's music - it just spits on everything you ever wanted to live for. I haven't listened much of punk, but I don't think that there are any bands so insanely angry as Akitsa. They sound like skinheads full of hatred and with a PLAN! I can never take seriously that anger against christianity, but here we've got whole different thing. It's that patriotic or proletarian anger, that you can witness on protest meetings. I can't understand it fully, because I have always avoided hard work and I don't care about politics, but I sure don't want to argue with those maniacs. When the vocalist screams in high pitch I don't even want to know what he must feel during that, but it must be at least as painful as drinking acid. Then again some songs are with clean vocals. When BM bands use clean vocals, they usually try to sound pagan and medieval or something. When Akitsa does it, the case is probably the same, but there isn't much romanticism in it, this sounds so self-confident like they haven't got anything to loose. It's like beating somebody up using just voice. Then again, it might sound a bit romantic - when you think of it as some bums trying to sing old military marching tunes, out of key of course. And after a while it just turns into wordless howling.
Besides the common themes of winter landscapes and misanthropy an important lyrical issue here is radical nationalism. They want Quebec to be separated from the rest of Canada. The lyrics are in french of course.

Tasmanian devil

Striborg - Catawampus (mp3)
Striborg on MySpace
Striborg is an one-man-band of a guy called Sin Nanna. He is also often called The King of Tasmanian Black Metal because his from Australia. And he certainly knows how to create a creepy atmosphere. It's not that kind of aggressive war-against-christianity attitude, but it's like some kind of evil hypnoze. The sound is one of a low-fi home recording and it matches perfectly when the goal is to portray the agony and isolation. The guitar sounds are like roaring waves on high frequency, the bass is like that same rustling sound when you blow or whistle into the microphone, and if you beat the rhythm with your fingers on a cardboard you can get the sound of the drums. But it doesn't make you deaf as it may happen with Ildjarn, for example. It all comes through echoes and reverbs, so the overall feeling is that you are surrounded by the music. When listening to spacerock, due to all this you can get a cosmic feeling. When listening to Striborg you can get the feeling of the elemental forces of nature - stormy weather, freezing winds etc, because the echoes come here with heavy buzzing. I think Striborg is one of the few blackmetallers who really can understand what are the possibilities of these lo-fi sounds. And he truely creates something artistically enjoyable out of it.

Sometimes Striborg uses synth too, but please don't expect any string arrangements or other dilettante symphonic stupidities. I must say that Striborg's synth parts are one of the few that I can tolerate in black metal. Of course it's not that I hate synthesizers, but it's about the approach and the sounds that most of the bands use. Take Burzum's synthalbums and you know what I mean. Striborg has also used those terrible string sounds, but it sounds so retarded that it seems intentional. He probably uses some really cheap kids keyboard and he doesn't care much about clean notes and harmonies. In the mix these strongly echoed obscure synthlines are somewhere between that fuzzy even more obscure guitar sound and they may come in whole different harmony.

The songs are long, sometimes 20 minutes or more. Striborg takes his time in changing themes. But it doesn't make the music boring (there are very few BM albums for my taste, that have only interesting tracks. Striborg isn't one of them, but 90% of it's material is still very inventive), it helps the listener to dive into that hypnotic buzz.
The vocals combine nicely with the general creepiness. Depending on the mood of the song, Sin Nanna uses many different approaches. A lot of different distorting effects are used, there is one track on "Nocturnal emission", where Sin Nanna sounds like a possessed animal trying to spell human language. The most impressive is when he screams with really high pitch. In one of the sequels of Police Academy there was a funny character - a caricaturistic personification of a rebellious hairmetal guy. He performed all his textlines in a high pitched shrieking voice ("HI! AAARGH! HOW ARE YOU! BLUAAARGH!!!) That's what this vocal reminds me.The feeling is kind of mysterious - let's say it feels like being face to face with some retarded magician - you don't know if he is going to turn you into a toad or will he give you some plastic flowers.

The lyrics are about coldness and misanthropy as ordinary with that type of depressive atmospheric black metal. Some song titles are still quite funny - take "The haunted gum trees". But what is there to expect anyway - Striborg is serious stuff. Sin Nannas is obsessed by creating total darkness (indeed it's a cliche in BM, he even has guts to admit it), but at least it's not about satanic christian bullshit (his own words). But you just can't keep from smiling when you hear how far out this guy must be with his evil spaciness. When compared with outsider music, which I think has a lot of similarities with these types of BM acts, I would say Striborg is Space Lady of black metal.

In the end of the rainbow....

Ved Buens Ende.... - I sang for the swans (mp3)
Ved Buens Ende... (In The End Of The Rainbow...) is a supergroup of Norwegian blackmetallers from bands such as Dodheimsgard, Aura Noir, Audiopain and Beyond Dawn. They have released only one full length "Written in waters" (the worst attempt of making metaphysically "deep" album cover) and one EP. It's hyperinventive experimental rock with blackmetal background. The sound is highly original, there is no comparison to it in the metal world. When compared with another openminded Norwegian BM group Fleurety, it's obvious how far from black metal Ved Buens Ende actually is. There is that certain melancholic feeling, which always follows the metal music. And there are those aggressive and raw sounds. But it's all done with a different touch. It's pretty close to postrock, but with a dark gothic and doomy edge. Well, it can be called post-blackmetal, but it's different from all those other bands that are considered to represent that style, because most of them (Peccatum, Arcturus, Solefald) have symphonic touch, but it's not present here.

I remember the first time when I listened to Ved Buens Ende, I was extremely impressed how proffessionally skilled those musicians are. Musicians who have some background of studying in music schools, have much more knowledge about the possibilities of selfexpression. I mean, if somebody has really studied playing drums, he has to know about different rhythms - how to play shuffle, bossanova or whatever. And if this musician is creative also, he knows how to use this knowledge. I can't say that there aren't metal bands with skilled musicians - it's opposite to that. Playing even very average sounding metal demands good sense of rhythm and a lot of physical control. But there's enormous lack of original ideas. Trapped in all those cliche's it seems that there are some kind of dogmas - certain things that all the metal bands must do. And no questions asked! There are many bands with enormous potential, but they just can't break out of that. And that's how Ved Buens Ende is different from all the rest. They have all the instrumental skills and they know how to use them in new direction.

The sound production is interesting. The sounds are warm, full and raw, it's hard to point out why, but the overall sound has that certain postrock feel. It's like a good tasty meal, where everything is in balance and some ingredients are kept in secret, so it's impossible to tell why it tastes so good. The vocals are most of the time clean, but the singing style is very eccentric. The texts are in english and sometimes they are sang intentionally with a strange accent. It seems as if the singer is trying to sound like an old man with trembling voice. In few songs there are also parts with thin and cold sounding shrieking vocals. And of course, it's already self-evident that all the guitar and percussion parts are very inventive. There's nothing average or traditional in them. It seems that everything is deconstructed to the basic elements and then built up again with a pure joy of experimenting.

Beware! Midget in the raincoat!

Ondskapt - Witch (mp3)
Ondskapt is a quartet from Sweden and this is the closing track of their 2005 album "Dödens evangelium". The rest of it wasn't enough interesting for my taste - pointlessly lost in the realm of metal cliche's. OK, there still was something, but I don't care to make difference between average and a little bit less average music. But this song... vow! This song is like a soundtrack for a ghost story. Slow creepy melodies describe perfectly how the unconscious fear gathers. The song is mostly instrumental, there are some whispers and distant voices, but no ordinary BM vocals. And there is something strangely grotesque in this music.
As I listen to it, immediately some of the creepiest movie episodes come to mind. A scene from David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive"- some guy has had a terrible nightmare and he is describing it to his friend in a diner. This nightmare took place in the parking lot of that same diner, so they are going to check the place out. When they reach the spot, the tension is really high. Nobody knows what to expect, the whole situation is just ridiculous and then ... a spooky figure dressed like some tribal witch slowly steps out behind the corner. It's so surrealistic, like childhood fears coming back to real life.
Or the final scene of Nicholas Roeg's "Don't look now" - man chasing a little girl dressed in red raincoat in the narrow streets of Venice. There's a schizoid atmosphere of despair, because that girl looks exactly like his own daughter, who had lately drowned. And finally in some dead end street the girl turns around . It has been a setup. It's not a girl, it's a disturbingly ugly midget, who attacks the man with a knife.
The final seconds, the best part of this song, create the same feeling. For five minutes the tension has slowly gathered. It has been like a fun trip through the house of horror in tivoli with all the skeletons and vampires popping out. And when everything is supposed to be already over, your worst nightmare comes true

Introduction

I discovered blackmetal in 1993 or 1994. Before that I was listening a lot of different death metal and grind core. As I remember, my first black metal album was Darkthrone's "Under a funeral moon". I still think that it's the second best BM album ever made (on the first place is Darkthrone's "Transilvanian hunger"). But back then everything else, all the scandinavian top bands and all the other who just wore corpsepaint also seemed interesting. I wasn't very demanding - all I needed was blastbeats and tremolo guitars. But my musical taste developed and some years later I was already listening to Stereolab, Sonic Youth and a lot of older progressive rock. And after that I began to explore the most obscure territories - free improvisation, outsider music etc.

Lately ,I don't know why, but I began to miss those teenage years of black metal. I started to explore the scene and I found that a lot of interesting stuff had happened during these years. Nowadays I can't tolerate most of the things I once loved in black metal. I tried to listen to Emperor, but it just made me feel stupid. I think that genuine black metal has to be as minimalistic and raw sounding as possible. Of couse, there are exceptions as always, but all the BM bands with sterile clean production and cheap anonymous metal sounds, trying to create something symphonic, make me sick. And even most of those bands who are supposed to be old-school and true are nothing but boring.
There are numerous bands doing more or less traditional primitive black metal that I still like - Blasphemy, early Graveland, Burzum, Mayhem and Immortal, Hellhammer, Sarcofago, Von and Mütiilation. These are examples of how things should be done in BM. But I'm not going to write about them in the following reviews. Most of these mentioned bands have a big cult following in metal circles. They are classics and everyone interested in BM should check them out by themselves.
Here I have set the goal to write about all the BM bands I know, who have done something strange, out of ordinary, experimental, amazingly eccentric etc. Some have just a slight experimental touch, some of them are doing more or less typical music, but have just one strange song, but metal is a very orthodox phenomenon, so it's still important to point these things out. And some of them are not musically experimental, but have just interesting lyrical conceptions. But I'm glad to say, that most of these groups and one-man-bands fall straight to the category of seriously braindamaged outsider music. And all these bands share the aesthetics of lo-fi production.