The noise diaries XII
How to avoid sex through music
Spring is here. Trees are budding. Birds engage in their annual renewal of the housing stock. Days are lengthening, and somehow even the rainfall seems charged with heavy handed virility. The very air you breathe oozes sex.
Of course this is all something I’m thoroughly against. The listening rotation recoils. Paralysed in competing convulsions of desire and repulsion, unsure which way to turn, which impulse to follow, or what weather pattern out of the indecisive cacophony of elements that is English springtime should dictate my soundtrack. The one common theme I can pick out in my current moods is a dogged commitment to the unsexy. The continuation of a defiantly virginal revelry is thrown into my ears to spite the emergently randy flowers, birds, and the first round of overly keen insects braving the still subzero mornings.
I’ve always been deeply suspicious of Viking metal’s claim to exist. For all its USP bluster, what are the commonalities of its various champions beyond Nordic yodelling? Its raw materials are easily assimilable into its nearest neighbours in various forms of heavy or black metal by way of folk. Despite my debilitating addiction to pedantry however, it’s easy to forget that language serves a very specific purpose: ejaculating your thoughts into someone else’s mind. Viking metal in this regard is like love, beauty, or pornography, the moment you define it, it tends to disappear, but you know when you see it.
I’d love to say this was the reason I’ve manged to avoid Falkenbach, arguably the most quintessentially Vikingy Viking metal band, for so long. The real reason is more malicious. I’m just deeply prejudice to genres whose reality I find dubious. Adjacent artists in Nokturnal Mortum, Summoning, Bathory, or Enslaved always felt more academically credentialed. For all their flamboyance, stylistic ambiguity, and idle digressions across metal’s postmodernist cosmopolitan fingering, they always return to homebase, always monitoring their roots in black or heavy metal, composting them with care and attention.
In contrast, Falkenbach, by the time they hit their stride with ‘…magni blandinn ok megintiri…’, came across as trying to conjure a sui generis genre without doing the legwork of actually crafting new techniques, modalities, or compositional norms. This is obviously unfair to Falkenbach. Not the accusation itself, mind. That’s completely fair, justified, and right. But it should really be levelled at the fanbase, willing Viking metal into existence off the back of the labours of bands like Falkenbach, all because they think they’re above rolling in the muck with the rest of us black metal obsessives. They hear what is essentially slowed down melodic black metal with some folky instruments and clean vocals and suddenly they’re getting all high minded about their Nordic ancestry and donning Thor’s hammer necklaces.
This is probably why I’m drawn more to the debut ‘…en their medh riki fara…’. Much like Nokturnal Mortum’s ‘Goat Horns’, it’s an album not afraid to reach further than its means, inviting the listener to perhaps imagine sounds and experiences that aren’t quite present in the guts of the music itself. We see the album as it aspires to be more than as it actually appears before us. Falkenbach’s keyboard array may not be quite as cheap as their Ukrainian counterparts at this time, but Vakyas is clearly propping up technological limitations with duct tape and sheer will.
The mid to late 90s saw an explosion of artists under the general banner of extreme metal attempting to push song length to its extremes whilst lacking the most basic understanding of how to achieve this with any discernible flow. Opeth being perhaps the most high profile example of this endearing immaturity. Falkenbach are another example par excellence. With each track on ‘…en their medh riki fara…’ being episodic, picking up and dropping ideas like a toddler at play.
Mid-paced linear black metal is – rather unsurprisingly – laid down as the spinal column to prop up these disarmingly garish celebrations of bright folk melodicism. Epic heavy metal via Bathory circa ‘Hammerheart’ is a comment almost too trivial to bother committing to paper. But there it is in case you were led to believe that I missed it.
So what’s my purpose here? Why I am poking around where I’m clearly not welcome? If we don the serious hat for a second, Falkenbach have little to offer beyond some competent black metal riffs, playful melodies, pleasingly restrained clean vocals, and maybe some above average keyboard patches and knowhow, foregrounding the instrument as a competitor to the guitars in ways I find equally refreshing in Summoning and Graveland. Beyond these meagre rations, Falkenbach give us little reason to come back for more.
But if we forget that music should be enjoyable for a bit, ‘…en their medh riki fara…’ is an instructive album. Instructive of where extreme metal was at this time, and of where it was heading. Strikingly ambitious yet unable to articulately frame its vision. Utterly untroubled by its own glaring limitations. Its amateurism. Overflowing with ideas but retaining no conception of how to organise them into a semblance of coherence. And replete with a fanbase, notepads in hand, ready and willing to prop up these efforts as somehow visionary or revolutionary, more in a desperate plea to protect their own intellectual investment in these projects than anything they could point to in the music itself. A fascinating and endlessly enjoyable time capsule for anyone looking to document how extreme metal got from ‘Altars of Madness’ to ‘Jumalten Aika’.
As we continue to wander out of the dark and into the light, we pull, a little inevitably, on the thrash metal lever. One of the few things that passes for summer music for the metalhead. Summarising even a single thought on Megadeth can be a little difficult. But I will say this. Even at their most undignified, they’re definitely the most entertaining of the American crop. And nothing emphasises this more than turning to the runt of their initial litter in ‘So Far, So Good…So What!’. Sandwiched between their two strongest albums, this angry oddball is often overlooked.
A brief, unfocused, mood swinging problem child, partially a result of lineup shifts, rotations at the mixing desk, and someone spilling reverb everywhere, it remains darkly endearing for a certain breed of masochistic fan.
The first thing to note is how unusual such an early misstep was amongst Megadeth’s pedigree. Of the aristocrats of thrash, and indeed what made them aristocrats, was an opening run of four or five near impeccable albums, regarded as gospel not just within metal but rock at large. Megadeth buck this trend by stumbling at the third, only to deliver their strongest material at the fourth with ‘Rust in Peace’. Mustaine’s aforementioned battle to retain a steady lineup in part explains this shoddy joinery.
The second thing to note is the fraying moods across the album itself. Following the strong opener in ‘Into the Lungs of Hell’ we get ‘Set the World Afire’, the main theme of which would have been quite at home on ‘Show no Mercy’, only for them to incongruously jump into an ill advised Sex Pistols cover, and in a final middle finger to continuity to the oddly melodic ballad ‘Mary Jane’. Of side two, ‘In My Darkest Hour’ stands apart as the most iconic moment, balancing comedy, drama, tragedy, power, pop sensibility sitting happily alongside metallic nuance and those creeping flourishes of inuendo unique to Mustaine’s riff basket.
Lastly, it should be noted that I will die on a hill flying the colours of Mustaine’s vocals. His weird nasally snarls are often set unfavourably alongside Hetfield’s proto bro-country, the implication being the obvious masculinity of the latter. This misunderstands the rather lawless territory of early thrash’s vocal stylings on two counts. One, early Hetfield as he appeared on Metallica’s opening triptych are in a higher register than the subsequent “yeah” era. Iconic, consistent, maybe even reliable, bordering on shrug inducing. Araya’s vocals pretty much speak for themselves. Mustaine’s however, a throaty snarl on paper in keeping with early thrash trends despite its greater emphasis on an arrogant punk swagger. But equally aspiring to the melodic flexes of the silverback metal crooners concocted with his apparent inability to contain emotion, riddled with odd spoken word passages, eccentric references to earlier blues and hard rock, or simple disgruntled machismo rendered uncanny by Mustaine’s character. The battle is front and centre, the emotions clear, the vulnerability in technique, the fact that one never quite knows where his voice will travel next (indeed even he doesn’t seem to know at times), all this makes for a fundamentally more interesting experience than anything Hetfield bellowed out at the time, even if the latter is more enjoyable.
Finally, the recent release of Immolation’s biography by Decibel books (review pending) has naturally led to another deep dive into this enigmatic pillar of death metal. Possibly not the most interesting characters to write a book about, simply by virtue of how fucking nice Dolan and Vigna are as people, especially when compared to the many antics of their peer group.
Immolation are, were, will always be, one of my favourite death metal bands. This is partly sentimental, but also intellectual. Being a child of black metal, as a young teen I had dipped my toe into Incantation and Morbid Angel by the time I picked up ‘Dawn of Possession’ on a whim, only to subsequently buy and consume every one of their albums in order of release – something I didn’t do with any other significant act in death metal – up to and including ‘Unholy Cult’ as the latest Immo release at the time. Each one warrants its own stand alone essay. I had always respected death metal, Immolation were the band that made me truly love the form, prompting me to write it a permission slip for a piece of my soul
Here, it’s back to ‘Dawn of Possession’ itself. It’s something of a bittersweet album. It easily holds its own against the stiff competition of the class of 91, even if it is ultimately outclassed by ‘Blessed are the Sick’, ‘Unquestionable Presence’ or ‘Mental Funeral’. But equally, Immolation, despite a renewed campaign of popularity thanks in part to their ritual signing of the Nuclear Blast death certificate, are often absent from the usual rundowns of death metal’s foundational documents. An unceremonious ejection from Roadrunner’s roster and the delayed release of their second album in part explains this. ‘Herein After’, released in 1996 to death metal’s vastly depleted fanbase never had much of a start in life. A fact also explainable by just how out there the album turned out to be, limiting its distribution to the connoisseur class of death metal as a result.
Circa ‘Dawn of Possession’ however, Immolation were still stylistically embedded within their generation, yet to fully articulate the mind expanding jazz tangents that found their way onto ‘Herein After’. But the seeds are mappable on ‘Dawn of Possession’, not least on Vigna’s remarkably well formed lead guitar work, made all the more so considering his age and experience at the time. I stand by my claim that he is one of most unique voices in death metal alongside Trey, the pair of which deserve recognition within the extended family of metal for their contribution to expanding the borders of guitar music.
The first four tracks achieve their aim as an opening salvo, already demonstrating their penchant for convoluted, unpredictably undulating riffs melded to uniquely dark, oppressive atmospheric currents that prove to be the ideal companion piece to what Incantation achieved on ‘Onward to Golgotha’ despite the obvious differences in intent between each album. There is a fluidity, naturalism, dignity, and sense of gothic occasion to the music lacking in the more mechanical preoccupations of the nearest competition. That being said, Immolation can go toe to toe with anyone as far as technical density is concerned. It’s this ability alongside an emergent malevolence that makes this music so worthy of repeated study, their music demands that you spend time with it. It never fails to be an eventful, conversational, lively sparring partner.
The latter half of the album may offer fewer highlights, ‘Burial Ground’ and ‘Immolation’ being revamped versions of earlier tracks. But it remains instructive on how Immolation grew out of their status as another plucky young upstart of early death metal arrogance fed on a diet of Venom and Slayer and into the complex intelligence that found its way onto ‘Failures for Gods’ and ‘Close to a World Below’. The opening riff on ‘After my Prayers’ never fails to catch me off guard. That, along with many other daring moments on this early material, remind us of what made death metal in its heyday so inspiring. A carefree, devil-may-care attitude that saw these young minds throw in whatever material felt right at a particular moment, all stewarded by a conscious meta logic that bound these freeform moments to a greater whole.
