Finding your feet again: Alcest's Kodama

The advance word on Kodama was that it was both a return to form for Alcest and a return to heaviness after 2014's (literally and metaphorically) becalmed effort, Shelter. Both are true, with slight qualifications. 

Kodama is unashamedly a rock album, offering a kind of blackened stadium sound bigger yet more intricate than what has gone before. It's reminiscent at time as much of Gilmour era Pink Floyd or 80's U2 (especially the guitars) gone prog as much as mainman Neige's beloved shoegaze. The odd blastbeat and harsh vocal aside, you'd be hard pressed to place it inside the boundaries of metal, though.

Genre purism aside, Neige shows he still knows his away around a catchy riff and, yes, the Alcest party trick of cutting everything out mid-song to showcase a bit of reflective guitar work is still present and correct. Winterhalter's drums are high in the mix, contributing to that big ol' clean progressive sound. The muted choirboy vocals, more than ever, thankfully save the record from the pomposity that might otherwise befall it, given the production values.

Lyrically and thematically we're back on the usual magic realism, this time with a Japanese twist, but it's all done in Alcestworld with such melancholic sincerity and consistency that I tend to find it endearing rather than otherwise. And the fact it's all in French, low in the mix, helps reduce the snark potential too.

None of Kodama is quite as immediate as say, Écailles de Lune, but it's pretty much been on constant rotation here since Christmas. It might be more a variation on an established theme than Shelter, but it's turned out to be an immensably likeable one. I'm not sure we should be asking Neige to turn out similar albums for the rest of his career, but if this is the sound of him finding his feet again then I very much like it indeed.

Rocks clever: Old Sunlight by Latitudes

Listening to Old Sunlight, I'm reminded that metal is the beast that ate prog rock whole: its technicality, its lyrical conceits, it's ambition and experimental bent. That can go one of two ways - either the incorporation of 70's styles into yr actl metal (Opeth, say) or accepting the mandate to march to your own drum.

Latitudes mostly take the latter path, playing long, mainly instrumental songs which shift riff regularly, swinging dynamically in the way a really tight rock rythym section can and appropriating ideas from across the metal microgenres. 

As the main signifier of prog of yore, keyboardist and occasional vocalist Adam Symonds sings in a slightly mannered and rather English way. And the production is very clean, which gels nicely with the musical approach, giving it a precise, almost jazz-fusion-y* feel.

The obsessively taxonomic Encyclopedia Metallum describes Latitudes as post-metal - which I like to think is code for 'we're not sure what this is but it rocks. Cleverly.'

In short, they play fussy, technical music reminding me a little of the 'very tight band' in this Scary Go Round strip. So, by rights I should hate Old Sunlight: many is the time I've stood up sitting down in the pub for ideas and heart in music over mere proficiency.

Here's the thing though: Latitudes can play the kablooey out of their instruments, but it's all placed at the service of the piece rather than to foreground a soloist or to justify self-indulgence. The intricacies are still perhaps a little hard for a lay reviewer to truly appreicate, but it's still really rather magical in a strangely funky sort of way.

And most signficantly: it's still on heavy rotation here.

Listen to the whole album on Bandcamp.

 *Ha! As if I know anything about jazz fusion.

No easy listening - Chelsea Wolfe's Abyss

I've read a few comparisons between Chelsea Wolfe and PJ Harvey and it's an easy (if superficial) one to make. Black hair, guitars, the absence of a Y chromosome, etc, etc.

What Wolfe's latest record, Abyss, reminds me at least as much of, though, is PJ's old West Country comrade Tricky.

That's not to say it sounds like Bristol circa 1994, although Wolfe and Tricky share a few musical tropes: a fondness for jackhammer industrial beats and vocals submerged in noise and sludge among them. But what really makes them feel like kin to me is the bleakness of the aesthetic, the claustrophobia of the effect.

In short, Abyss is a gripping place to visit, but not necessarily a conventionally fun experience. The nearest thing to a conventional rock tune is second track Iron Moon - a quiet/loud/quiet treacle wig-out revolving around a chorus which proclaims 'My heart is still a tomb.' 

Elsewhere, lyrical and melody lines repeat over rythyms and grind which threaten to swallow the singer. Folk laments dissolve in a wash of noise or discordant piano. Guitars follow the 'lower and slower' edict of doom metal.

Now, we used to have a name for this sort of thing. Without apology, we used to call it goth. And there's nothing wrong with seriousness of purpose and a tragic aesthetic - and Wolfe absolutely nails both. The cold-sounding production works in her favour, too.

Abyss isn't easy listening because it's not meant to be. It's a piece of musical quicksand with something to say, and even if it's not an everyday listen, that counts for quite a lot in my book.

Here's the album on Bandcamp and the video to single Carrion Flowers.

Why yes, that is the album cover

Remember that moment in fashion a few years back when models swanned around in vintage metal T-shirts? Gold are the musical equivalent - raiding the closet for bullet belts and leather jackets and upcycling what they find into something approaching (gasp) pop music.

(why yes, that is the album cover)

It's all relative. I mean, their No Image album still comes with big, big riffs, thunderous drumming (mixed really high and sounding great) and songs which stand 'as a monument to civilisation's decline.' But the vocals are clean, the tunes average out around 4 minutes and mostly go verse/BIG CHORUS/verse.

You can listen to the whole album on Bandcamp here.  Or watch the video for The Controller below.

The overall effect is if Garbage (and singer Milena Eva does have a touch of the Shirley's about her vocally) had put out Vow and then decided to get heavier, without sacrificing any of the pop nous that made them so initially promising in the first place.

The opening trio of Servant, Old Habits and O.D.I.R (Only Death Is Real, natch) make No Image a real statement of intent, and while the album sags a little in the middle it also ends strongly .

Metallic art pop, then. Or pop art metal. Either way, Gold are doing something I don't hear a lot of bands doing at the moment, and doing it well.

Well, that explains the banjos - Panopticon's Kentucky

One of the intriguing things about black metal to an outsider is the proliferation of solo studio projects like Panopticon.

Maybe there's something about the individualism of black metal ideology which makes going your own way as appealing as the more traditional path of forming a band. Or that it's a simple matter of efficiency in an economically marginal music.

Superstructure? Base? Or perhaps both.

Behind Panopticon's one-man-band is Austin Lunn, who drums like his life depended on it, but is also a pretty fine guitarist, shrieker and banjo-player.

Ah yes, the banjos. I should probably explain.

2012's Kentucky is one of those albums which defiantly spill out of the genre to which they have been assigned. Over 50 minutes, Lunn mixes black metal with bluegrass, traditional mining protest songs, ambient noise and spoken-word samples to tell a musical history of the rural backwaters of his then home-state.

Crucially - it all works side by side. There's neither a hint of tongue-in-cheek condescension in Lunn's country, nor any dilution in the ferocity of the metal through its juxtaposition with other musics. Granted, letting a tin whistle carry the lead riff in Bodies Under The Falls (about the slaughter of Kentucky's Native Americans by the original colonists) might take a little getting used to, but once you're there you wouldn't change it for the world.

The choice of additional texts to supplement the original material is also superb. Lunn's anarchist sensibilities are to the fore in his covers of traditional union songs such as Which Side Are You On? and Come All Ye Coal Miners, the latter containing the memorable couplet 'I am a coal miner's son and I'm sure I wish you well / Let's sink this capitalist system in the darkest pits of hell.' 

He supplements this with sound clips from the archives to illustrate the hardship of rural Kentucky mining settlements  - as chants of 'Strike! Strike! Strike!' echo through your speakers, an old miner tells his interviewer that everyone - from the company down through the politicians, the priests and the union officials - is against ordinary workers seeking a fair deal. Their only recourse - to organise and stand together.

Kentucky is not only a great rock album, thanks to Lunn's assembly of his own and others' material it's also deeply moving. It's profoundly evocative of a particular place and time, of people's collective endeavour in the land that bore them yet all too often buried them before their time.

In the recent past, I've written about black metal's tendency towards the transcendental. Yet Kentucky is one of the least transcendental blackened records I've come across - it seems to me angry, compassionate, but above all committed to life as it is and is meant to be. Before we lose ourselves, let us first have justice - if you like.

Proof that a genre founded on exception itself contains the necessity for exception.

Black metal ecology - Agalloch's Marrow Of The Spirit

Agalloch have been weaving back and forth across the line between metal and neofolk ever since their beginnings in the mid 90's. Marrow Of The Spirit - the album before the last one - veers towards the metal end of their personal spectrum.

They are less abrasive than most, using whispers and chants as well as the traditional rasping of their fellows,plus gorgeous acoustic and electronic interludes. And often the songs on Marrow - take Into The Painted Grey as an example - sound like black metal superstructure on an electric folk base.

This makes the read across from the Velvet Underground/Sonic Youth tradition of amped-up urban folk noise all the easier for the indie kid taking the road more metalled. And perhaps explained why I've gotten into this album and struggled with the others in Agalloch's discography.

Marrow is beautifully sequenced and mixed, from the opening duet for cello and mountain stream to the apocalyptic jig which concludes the album. Although each song is at least 10 minutes long with at least two or three distinct phases therein, for me it works best as a single continuous listen, albeit a marathon one.

Unlike Wolves In The Throne Room, there's no link to eco-anarchism here. Indeed, Agalloch are at pains to be resolutely apolitical in their lyrics and public statements, espousing cosmic paganism and a spiritual connection with nature. 

This art-for-art's-sake stance taken to the ne plus ultra makes the band a decidedly more conservative proposition than WITTR or some of the other acts I've come across in my eco-metal explorations.

It's also sometimes hard to locate the human element in Agalloch's work, or to escape the feeling that they have nothing to say about the present other than the need to transcend or transform it. Listening to them is occasionally a visceral joy, but more often an austere, intellectual pleasure, especially given the length of the songs.

Sometimes, I wish they'd lighten up.

But, accepting that Agalloch's Non-Stop Party Hits with 'Happy' John Haughm is unlikely to be a thing, let's appreciate what we've actually got: an epic musical drama of great scope and breadth.

Campfire metal - Falls of Rauros' Believe In No Coming Shore

Affability is a curious trait to single out in any album, let alone one with black metal voice.

But Maine band Falls of Rauros' Believe In No Coming Shore is a lovely, warm-sounding, folk-ridden piece of work, shrieking or no.

So why's it been on repeat during my journeys this week? 

The guitars. 

Whether Falls of Rauros are charging forward at blast-beat speed, or slowing for doom metal boogie, acoustic interludes and spindly-indie post-rocking, the playing always retains a calming campfire quality to it. To these ears, indie-soaked as they are, the two reference points that spring to mind are David Pajo of Slint, Tortoise et al and Doug Martsch from Built To Spill. Warm, contemplative guitarists both.

To illustrate, let me present the riff on Ancestors of Shadow. Beautiful device that it is, even the band love it so much that they reprise it later in the album.

 

If this gets you, then the remainder of the album will keep growing on you. I near as darnit guarantee it. Clocking in at a spare 40+ minutes, it's a pleasing reminder to artists everywhere that you can produce a well-rounded album in less than an hour and not leave the listener short-changed.

The vocals provide the grit in the oyster and prevent Believe descending into the blackened equivalent of Carole King's Tapestry (although that would be an awesome thing indeed, if anyone fancies it). The lyrics, as usual, are indecipherable, but their meditations on autonomy and persistence make for a surprisingly compelling textual companion piece to the music. 

One final thought: it's striking how successfully Falls of Rauros integrate some of the musical and approaches of extreme metal into the continuum of (alternative) rock. Or, if you like, vice versa. Either way, it feels like there's some fence moving going on, and for a confirmed believer in musical impurity like myself this can only be a good thing.

Black metal ecology

As an outsider and music fan looking into black metal, it's interesting how to see how quickly it moved from straight-up Satanic nihilism 'n' blast-beats in the early 90's to the search for new musical and cultural values.

Much like punk (or any Romantic movement, for that matter) the rejection of the immediate past becomes not just a foundation for new orthodoxies, but for new heresies.The rediscovery of forgotten traditions. 

And one persistent escape route from pure negation has been towards deep ecological themes. 

After all, if you've rejected not just humanism and liberalism, but the ideological boundaries of traditional black metal, where do you go? The pursuit of transcendence through nature - generally implicitly but sometimes explicitly pagan - suggests a way of living rightly as well as providing lyrical inspiration and a whole new instrumental palette from the folk tradition.

Musically and memetically speaking, this interest in nature and folk music was embedded in the genre at a relatively early stage - most prominently in Ulver (see my Kveldsanger review here) but also in the Tolkienesque leanings of most of the early 90's Norwegian bands. 

Yet the fullest implications of black metal ecology seem to have been worked out in the US - the last Western frontier state - with bands like Agalloch, Botanist, Panopticon and Wolves In The Throne Room (WITTR). 

These band's membership of the black metal club may be disputed by the kvlt or denied by the bands themselves. But they're certainly 'blackened' in the sense that it's impossible to imagine them existing without the Norwegian year zero. 

Wolves in the Throne Room, Tivoli Helling, Utrecht by Enric Martinez, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 generic license.

Wolves In The Throne Room

WITTR - particularly, their Black Cascade album, was my gateway to black metal and its offshoots - how could I resist a band which allegedly formed at an Earth First camp and sounded like the imminent collapse of civilisation?

Or - for the more prosaically minded - exactly as exciting as a shoe-gazing Motörhead might sound? 

Since Black Cascade, when the first fan-boy in corpse-paint disparaged them as hipsters and sellouts, WITTR have been on an escape trajectory from black metal.  So they've dialed back the aggression and moved onto the endearingly grand Celestial Lineage and its ambient alter ego, Celestite. 

From the first of those, Woodland Cathedral (below) mixes chanted vocals, organ with that black metal tremolo guitar to beguiling effect.  Being the song of love and reverence to the forest which the title suggests, it does exemplify the tendency of eco-metal to take itself very seriously indeed. While this fits the subject matter, it does also leave it looking a little po-faced at times.

Bearing witness

An interesting way of viewing WITTR is - I think - as a project of bearing witness, an idea common to the Quakers on the one hand as it is to the nihilistic fantasies of Lovecraft on the other.

Despite their eco-anarchist roots and their agrarian commune in the Pacific Northwest, they aren't in the business of providing solutions to environmental problems. They aren't even inclined to offer a lyrical diagnosis, in the same way that a death metal, punk or grindcore act from similar sub-cultural roots might be inclined to decry the evils of the world.

Rather, WITTR observe. Their songs look at the rapture of nature as is, and the imagined apocalypse as may be.

Progenie Terrestre Pura

Today's micro-genre is ambient blackened space-metal, courtesy of the rather marvelous Progenie Terrestre Pura from Italy. You can listen to or download the whole album from their Bandcamp page for less than a fiver.

Raise your hand if the cover gives you flashbacks to classic SF airbrush art of the 70's and 80's.

[raises hand]

Opeth's Deliverance: an outsider's entry point into death metal

An outsider looking for an entry point into death metal could do a lot worse than mid-period Opeth (Blackwater Park, Deliverance*, Watershed). The key elements of DM are present and correct: riffs, hundred-hand slap drumming and RRURRGH vocals, but they're leavened by a strong sense of melody, even at their hardest. 

But then there's the prog rock too. 

Metal has its share of time-signature fetishists and intellectual posing, but the prog in play here from Opeth is the gentle existentialism of Dark Side-era Pink Floyd. The pianos, acoustic guitars and ballad-like interludes sandwiched between the death metal crunches not only give the loud-quiet-loud song structures real dynamism, but also make for a more adventurous but less brutal listen. 

Lynchpin Mikael Akerfeldt has a good Greg Lake/Roger Waters style 'clean' voice in between the Cookie Monster moments and sings about mental frailty and personal crisis rather than horror movie scenarios. The album artwork is appropriately gothic rather than the usual bloodstained DM fantasies.

In short -  nothing about Opeth scares the horses or implies that by listening to death metal you're suddenly regressing to being a 16-year old bedroom-dweller with a large collection of Space Marine figures.** 

Progressive rock's more doubtful gift to Opeth is sheer length. Deliverance, which I've been listening too most recently, has six tracks, five of which clock in at 10 minutes plus, which in theory means a lot of tunes per track. This works in spades for the title track, which takes you up a switchback of folk and metal before culminating in twitchy death metal funk with - yes - a tricky time signature. It's utterly brilliant, as is Wreath, the number which kicks off the album.

The rest of the prog/death mash-up on Deliverance doesn't work quite as well - with the benefit of hindsight it feels like a rehearsal for the superior (if a little softer) Watershed. The length of the tracks start to work against Opeth, with the two different strands like oil and water, refusing to come together.

Opeth's other weakness is the flipside of their accessibility - I wonder that by giving up on the bug-eyed, gross-out quality of death metal to deal in Floydian platitudes some of the intensity is (rightly or wrongly) lost thereby. They're an easy band to like and respect but a hard band to love.


* there's Damnation too, and that's all prog rock balladry, presaging Opeth's later career trajectory.

** I had Space Marines once, admittedly. But I gave them away to the Space Marine Conservation Society.

Thergothon's Stream From The Heavens: as ambient as metal gets?

This record sounds cheap. Its lyrical subject matter is adolescent. I'm still not sure if all of its musical effect is intentional. But to me it's unquestionably a great record, partly because it sounds like nothing else I've heard, partly because I can hear its influence echoing in other things I've listened to and loved.

Contradiction? Not quite – allow me to explain.

Echo is indeed the operative word here, since Thergothon's only album proper (from 1992) is very nearly as ambient as metal gets. Dominated by long, slow guitar lines, heavy on the reverb, like  Sabbath in treacle, notes are left hanging in the air before the music drags itself forward one more step. On some songs, the guitarist seems to be tuning up for several minutes before a riff emerges from the gloom.

Underneath this, growling vocals are interspersed with chanting and whispering, all indecipherable, Lovecraft-inspired. Occasional 'atmospheric' interventions from what sounds like a child's Casio keyboard induce a feeling of mild narm. Somewhere in the background, the drums plod on with barely a hint of swing. The tinny production actively hinders any usual feeling of metal awe.

And yet taken as a whole, Stream... makes for an accessible avant-garde smash. It's doom metal in love with the hum of the amplifier, crude fragments of electric blues and folk rising out of the murk. It's drone metal with songs. The lo-fi production's tendency to undercut the ambition of the record strips it of pomposity, rendering it oddly endearing. 

The album spawned a new micro-genre in its wake: funereal doom metal, although what I've heard of its offspring so far suggests that there was something magical in the original production and throwing money at the sound quality just takes it away and gives you something far more orthodox (and therefore considerably less interesting).

However, it's also not too big a jump further out and forward in time from Thergothon to beatless, decidely less song-oriented acts like Sunn O))) . Keep the pace down but tighten up the playing, add in a smattering of jazz and blues, and then you've got late-period Earth, circa The Bees Made Honey In The Lion's Skull. 

It might be a misreading of metal history, but I hope it's a strong one. For me Stream... sits much more readily in that progressive tradition than Sabbath played at half speed with an extra dollop of misery. But its both a ground-breaking and love(craft)able piece of work in its own right.

Indie in crisis: have all the innovators gone metal?

An aside on metal from Simon Reynolds in Totally Wired: Post-punk Interviews and Overviews.

In some ways, if you can see an inheritor of post-punk's confidence in speaking out and shouting down power and the effectiveness of words, it's heavy metal. Which is not genealogically or genre-ologically part of the punk/post-punk/alt-rock lineage at all. 

Maybe a few genes have drifted over from Goth or industrial, but historically there's really hardly any link. As was mentioned before, metal was the enemy, as far as post-punkers were concerned. 

But now, through its own evolution through thrash and death and black metal, it's reached a place where much of what characterised post-punk - the darkness, the dread, the wordiness - can be found in its vital contemporary form only in the metal underground.

You'll also find there that whole set of ideals to do with musical progression and fusing different styles together. Extreme metal is totally committed to ideas on innovation and genre-splicing

Interesting in light of yesterday's reflections on the NME's top 500 albums of all time. Is modern day indie is so locked into resurrecting the the past that - individual auteurs aside - the innovators, those holding up a mirror to modern life have largely moved on, whether that's metal, hip hop, electronic music or elsewhere?

Video of the week: Candlemass - Bewitched

Much thanks to the wonderful Map of Metal for introducing me to this marvelous track from the late 80's by Swedish doom metal act Candlemass.

Three reasons Bewitched demands listening.

1. Singer Messiah Marcolin's demonic choirboy voice has to heard to be believed.

2.  That riff.

3. It actually starts with Handel's Dead March done in the metal style.

3. This video by Jonas Akerlund (of Smack My B**tch Up notoriety) which walks the line between complete hokum and even more utter hokum.

Let me break it down for you:

0:00 - It's the metal re-enactment of the Monty Python Undertaker's sketch.

0:30 - Riff!

1:25 - Wait. Who left the dry ice in that coffin!

1:30 - Woah! Mad monk's just leapt out of a coffin!

2:00 - First appearance of the Messiah Marcolin front-crawl-head-bang dance! Yeah!

2.45 - MM starts hypnotizing metal fans with his sweet, sweet singing. And his luxurious mane of hair. #envy

3.00 -  You are beee-weeeeeeee-ttched!

3.10 - Oh. MM appears to have met a woman. She's dressed very sensibly for the snow in a green parka with her hood up.

3.50 - MM turns the full force of his vocal power on her. She sensibly flees before the onslaught and the wild, wild overacting that accompanies it...

4.10 - ... but she is eventually, yep, you guessed it - beee-weeeeeeee-ttched!

4.25 - MM has a whole army of beee-weeeeeeee-ttched metalhead zombies

4.45 - Guitarist takes a solo while MM alternatively strokes and shoves his denim clad minions.

5.15 - Still soloing, still shoving

5.30 - Uh-huh - still soloing

5.45 - Riff!

5.50 - Everyone does the Messiah Marcolin front-crawl-head-bang dance! Yeah! 

6.00 - Close up on stomping Swedish feet #vintageconverseenvy

6.45 - Headbanging around the coffin is the new All Around My Hat.

7.10 - You are beee-weeeeeeee-ttched!

7.15 - Back in your coffin, Marcolin!

Lemmy: Metal Clarkson or existentialist hero?

Over Easter weekend, I read Lemmy's autobiography White Line Fever - a charity shop purchase, honest! If you've ever read any interview with Mr Motörhead, it's exactly what you'd expect: debauched, hypermasculine, brutally frank and narrow of vision.

It would be easy to write a blog post which catalogued all the accidental Partridge moments in this book.

I think that's what women like about horses - a being so strong that gives in without fighting back ... It won't do the washing up, but that's a small price to pay.

It would be just as easy to cast him as a Jeremy Clarkson figure when he writes things like this: 

In those days, we still had sissies, see. They weren't running the country like they are now.

But the book and the man deserve a (slightly) more rounded perspective. The former is at least a darn sight more entertaining than  Tony Iommi's, the last comparable book I read, probably because Iommi's art is his music, while Lemmy performs his life at least as much as his music.

The man, too, is more self-aware than his reputation (or the quotes above) might suggest. He genuinely likes women, and is a lot more live and let live on equality issues than otherwise.

He's also a self-made man in every sense of the word. After being fired from Hawkwind, he resolved to be master of his own future. Forming Motörhead, he painted his psychedelic amps black and moulded himself into an avatar of greasy, hard-living, toxic-blooded rock 'n' roll. 

And unlike many of the others who trod this path, this focus on a constant state of being rock 'n' roll hasn't been subsumed by the temptations on offer. Not has Lemmy fallen prey to the alternatives of pursuing a quiet life or elevating his music to capital-a Art.

There is only constant, forward momentum - to stop, to doubt, is to be un-Lemmy. And there's something curiously noble about this dedication, in spite of the fact I'd disagree with him about a lot of things.

The genius of Ulver in 5 clips

It's hard to imagine a better way for a band to be insulated from the alternative mainstream than Ulver's triple whammy:

1. Be Norwegian
2. Don't perform live for 15 years.
3. Start out as part of the early 90's black metal scene in Norway which, whatever else it was, was certainly not indie-friendly.

As it is, they've quietly gotten on with becoming one of the best bands on the planet without much serious English-language coverage outside the world of metal, which seemingly hasn't rescinded their membership of The Club (they're still a bunch of intimidating looking guys with tattoos, after all)

I'm also hard pressed to think of a group which has made music in so many styles - black metal, folk, instrumental hip-hop, ambient, prog, dream-pop - and made darn fine records in all of them. 

I'd shorthand them as the Norwegian Radiohead or the Norwegian Notwist if I didn't think I was going to be struck down for lazy pigeonholing if I did.

So let's take a quick tour through their back catalogue, starting with their good-bye-to-black -metal third album, Nattens Madrigal.(1996)..

The lead off track, Of Wolf and Fear, is a fuzzy blast of barely discernable noise, with themes and vocals lycanthropic in equal measure. It's strong medicine, indeed.

But even before then, Ulver had shown exciting signs of eclecticism - album number two Kveldsanger, from the previous year, was a full-on excursion into beautiful, austere acoustic folk, with singer Kristoffer 'Garm' Rygg's vocals multi-tracked over classical guitar and strings. Check out Østenfor Sol og vestenfor Maane here for a flavour.

By 2000 and Ulver's fifth album Perdition City, shedding members as they went, they'd arrived at instrumental hip-hop soundtracks to imaginary films, five years after the high-water mark of tr*p-h*p. Garm was now referring to himself as Trickster G and barely sings at all. You don't need me to tell you how bad this could have been.

If it wasn't apparent before this point in their career that Ulver didn't give a damn what anyone else thought, it was now.

Except, against the odds, Perdition City is great - atmospheric, brooding, applying the sound-scaping lessons of their black metal apprenticeship to a different, no longer fashionable genre and making it work.

Here's Hallways of Always (a Nearly God/Tricky reference?)

Fast forward through ambient and soundtrack works of the early 00's which build on the platform of Perdition City and push it out further, and by the middle of the decade Ulver decided to become more of an orthodox (for Ulver values of orthodox) band again.

Of the three original, for-want-of-a-better-word-proggy albums that followed, the mother bear and #7, Shadows Of The Sun (2007) is my favourite. A set of slow-burns for late night listening, with some of Rygg's best singing accompanied by droning, hymnal keys, glitching and jazz playing, it's really rather wonderful.

And they even find time to cover Black Sabbath's Solitude.

 
Last year's album was a set of covers of 60's psychedelia, Childhood's End. By far and away, the most straight-ahead thing they've done, their own take on Nuggets it was what reeled me in to Ulver when I came across it in (yes) the metal section of the record store when beginning my odyssey from indie towards stranger shores.

Here's their take on In The Past by the Chocolate Watch Band which manages to be perky and slightly unsettling at the same time, very much in the psych spirit.

Ulver square the circle between constant reinvention and authenticity to themselves so well that you have to ask how they have managed it when so many others have tried and failed before? Certainly, I think they've been both lucky and smart in their relationship to the alternative mainstream; circumstances and their own efforts have created a space where they can be their awesome selves.

But they've also been consistent in their own vision of music and their own themes and motifs - melancholic, brooding, Byronic, subversive - whatever genre they've been operating in and whoever the core group has drafted into help. 

Scratch the surface of any of these albums and you find the same Ulver genius.

Altaar: music for melancholic minds

Altaar's self-titled album may be adding extra weight to the idea that doom metal is only a small step away from being lounge music for the leather jackets and beards brigade, but it is pretty darn good.

There's an exclusive stream of the album on the Invisible Oranges blog. You should check it out now.

Over two long-form pieces we get Dylan Carlson style instrumental metallic-folk blues - slow, stately and cool, man - punctuated by drones and steady-state wig-outs. 

At one point on the second track - Dei Absolutte Krav Og Den Absolute Nåde (they're Norwegian, don't you know) the singer wakes up from his reverie, goads the drummer into upping the tempo, and briefly gives it his best Joe Cocker goes black metal.

Spent, he collapses back into the narcotic/necrotic haze from whence he came. His cooler bandmates, mellow unharshed, return to carrying him in state across the monochrome terrain.

This is music made by melancholic minds, clipped of expectation, elegant and elegaic. I love it, and I'd do so without qualification were it not for the feeling that those responsible feel lost as the rest of us.

The Black Metal Nick Drake: Alcest - Les Écailles De Lune

Sometimes you need in your life a music which takes you away from all this reality - unconcerned with the here and now and emotionally affecting you in a way which surpasses language and subject.

The second Alcest album,  Les Écailles De Lune (2010) is that kind of music. 

Essentially a one-man band, Alcest's roots are in black metal, but by the time of Ecailles the blast beats and growling are only one element of the music. They jostle for space with some lovely fluid post-rock guitar lines which Dave Pajo would be proud of, together with a lot of love for early 90's shoegaze (see Solar Song below for the best example of this, as well as the most accessible moment on the album).
  

One of the criticisms frequently levelled at then-shoegaze was that it had nothing to say - behind the fringes and the mumbling there was nothing but beautiful noise. Intentionally or not, Neige (Monsieur Alcest) deals with this by providing a meta-narrative for his songs, all of which address ... and this is where it gets interesting ... his nostalgia for childhood experiences of another world.

In fact, he insists on the validity of these experiences when questioned in interviews. To revise an old Spacemen 3 quote, Neige's approach seems to be having transcendental experiences to make to music to have transcendental experiences to. 

This wouldn't be the first time an artist has used a frame like this as the basis for their work, whether we're talking religious devotion or the UFO reveries of late-period Philip K Dick. And it lends the whole enterprise a greater degree of intensity, an introspective self-sufficiency which elevates Alcest from middle-class freakout to something approaching beautiful, melancholic outsider art.

Oh, and best thing I've heard so far this year.

Terrorizer: take a stronger stand on racism

One of the things that puzzles me about metal is the willingness in magazines and blogs to give certain musicians' decidedly unsavory political opinions a pass. 

To be clear - I don't believe you have to take an explicitly political position when you're writing about music. Even for me, someone who lives and breathes the bigger picture, at least seven or eight times out of ten it's superfluous.

But an apolitical stance has consequences  when it means you can't - or won't - keep artists' self-serving cant or the indirect promotion of hate speech out of your pages. 

Let's take the interview in Terrorizer #231 with Metatron from pagan metal project The Wolves of Avalon, on the reissue of their Carrion Crows Over Camlann album. 

Terrorizer is the perfect example of the "I'm listening to the music not the politics" position: it'll run articles and reviews on anyone from, say, Cattle Decapitation on the left to Burzum on the right. 

If it has any ideology at all, it's a live and let live rugged individualism and respect for the artist. Perhaps too much respect, as I've previously observed.

And I'm going to be careful here to say that Metatron from the Wolves isn't racist either - he's on record in other interviews as making this very clear. If anything it seems like his personal politics are secondary to his spirit of provocation.  

But - and here's where the problem starts - Carrion Crows Over Camlann features a guest spot from Polish Black Metal artist Rob Darken, whose reputation in the scene might as well as be that Nazi racist Rob Darken. 

Although to be fair to Rob, he doesn't call himself a Nazi, he just possesses what 'most people would call extreme right-wing National Socialist convictions.'  

Er....

The point of this distinction eludes me, at any rate.   

So how does Faye Coulman for Terrorizer report this?

"Shocked fans and critics alike condemned this questionable collaboration."

Good so far..

"But as the mists of confusion and media hysteria began to lift in the months that followed, increasing attention around this undeniably blistering full-length soon warranted a reissue."

[Headdesk] 

If you can't beat 'em, dismiss them as confused hysterics, eh?

This sets the tone nicely for Metatron to embark on a series of dubious arguments for the inclusion of Darken on the record.

 “Over the years, I think Rob has distanced himself from the daft things I think he's said in the past.”

If anyone can point me towards a sincere recantation, I'll gladly rewrite this piece. Google, however, says no.

“But I believe that he once said some pretty naughty things about Jews because national socialist black metal is basically anti-Semitic.”

Note to Metatron: naughty is how you describe a kitten that's just 'adorably' clawed your sofa. Anti-semitism and national socialism, not so much.

“It's very difficult to understand the Polish mindset on all things like that, because, when the war ended, the West seemed to integrate with all the immigrants that were coming to and fro. But Eastern Europe never had that, so if you go to Poland now, it's pretty much full of Poles and their mindset is difficult to grasp.”

So, supposedly racist Poles should get a pass on being racist, because history? Isn't that a) a trifle insulting to the Poles, b) illogical? c) irrelevant to deciding whether or not to work with Rob Darken?

“It's pretty much the mindset we would've had 300 years ago, when that kind of national embodiment of spirit existed.”

Here, Metatron manages to make the Poles and their 'national embodiment of spirit' sound, hey, pretty cool compared to us Brits with our more cosmopolitan, rootless, urban ways. 

Reads to me like a dog-whistle message for cultural conservatives. And that's being generous.

Also, I missed the memo where we were told that we were taking Fichte seriously again. 

“But, apart from Rob's inclusion, the Wolves of Avalon and this album are in no way affiliated with all that because it's [the album] in an era that literally predates anti-Semitism.”

No. You could have roped Rob in for a black metal re-imagining of Ice Age and the critics would have still been entitled to call you out for collaborating with him.

By the way, I would pay to see a BM re-imagining of Ice Age, if anyone's reading this. Heck, I'd settle for The Land Before Time. But I digress...

Needless to say, none of  these bogus reasons for deploying the Darken get challenged in the article, although it's hardly difficult to do so.

So, let's recap. 

Try to think of Rob Darken as a small racist matroshka doll. Work with me on this.

Image by Fanghong and used here under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

1. Rob contributes to an album by the Wolves of Avalon - not racist but decidely unwise in their choice of collaborators. 

[places Rob doll inside slightly larger provocative pagan metal WOA doll]

2. The Wolves then attempt to justify themselves in Terrorizer and don't really have a leg to stand on.

[places WOA doll inside the protective metal mutha doll of Terrrorizer]

3. Terrorizer scribe fails to challenge either the decision to include Darken in the first place or the non-arguments being used by the Wolves to defend themselves.

Result: Rob Darken and hate speech are brought more within the pale of what is permissable in metal culture. Everybody loses.

Why this matters?

I'm not sure I even need to say this, but out there in the real world, we have enough of a problem with racism without it being russian-dolled into the pages of Terrorizer. There were 12,711 racist attacks in the UK in 2010/2011 - that's around 35 every day of the year that actually get to court. Never mind the ones that don't get that far or that aren't even reported.

It's not about whether anyone who listens to Rob Darken then goes off to commit hate crimes. It's about whether we are willing to accept the creeping legitimation of racism in our culture which underpins these attacks. And Terrorizer is on sale in W H Smiths so, like it or not, it is hardly as marginal as it might think.

And I'm not saying that racism is a big part of metal life as a whole. It's great that critics and the public did call the Wolves out on their decision to work with Darken. 

So Terrorizer doesn't need to suddenly start consulting Dave Spart on all its editorial policy lines.

It needs to show some journalistic backbone and come off the fence when confronted by prejudice. It needs to realise that sometimes the message outweighs the medium. It needs to challenge the position of bands who might - intentionally or otherwise - be sanitising the far right. It needs not to accept what they say as gospel truth.