Every day, black metal tries to escape its past and get to the moment before that past when the why of black metal was clearer, because only from striving for that goal can black metal recapture its sense of beauty, melancholy, and transcendent balance of light and dark.
Revisiting the glory days of the third Darkthrone and second Gorgoroth albums, Black Funeral escape the current fixation on novelty that is really recombined ancient extraneous genres, and instead go for a classic black metal sound that serves to support a vocal presentation.
As a result, this album features moments of great beauty before returning to sweeping mid-paced and doom-paced droning passages designed to present its impressive synthesis of ritual magick and ancient Islam, still searching for that eternal purpose found in its influences.
Tags: black funeral, Black Metal
Sounds like Sacramentum.
The past is the past. You cannot “recapture its glory.” What made black metal vital and urgent back in the day was real, but many people ignored it—either because they felt threatened by it or, more likely, couldn’t be bothered. From what I recall, it was more Dimmu Borgir than Burzum that brought black metal some level of awareness, along with, of course, Emperor. But as always happens, and as this site has repeatedly explained, the style quickly devolved into a trend, playing with now-standardized tropes. As is the case with music, life simply faded away from it. This is the eternal question in art: What if someone came along and composed like Beethoven today? Or if a blues musician tried to “recapture” the early delta sound? It never works because it’s out of context, and the meaning is lost. The sound that once cut through the membrane of conventions becomes a convention itself. End of story.
We shouldn’t even be talking about black metal anymore. It was a moment in time, and people tend to overvalue it as the years pass. I was there, and the level of worship wasn’t anywhere near what it has become. The same goes for death metal, by the way. Most bands were struggling, even the so-called “legends.” So, the whole “it was better back then” attitude is kind of annoying when it shuts us off from what’s happening now. When worship prevents new knives from being sharpened, it erodes our very sense of hearing.
While I generally agree with the writing here, I do think there’s more value in the current metal scene than what is reflected. Bands like Ad Nauseam are astonishingly good. Anachronism, from Switzerland, may sound more like Gorguts than Celtic Frost, but they still offer plenty to love.
No, homie… that’s the whole point: the past is alive. History is cyclic. What we restore, we renew.
Interesting. I do believe that past informs the present and there are repeating cycles throughout human history. While I see the past as something you can’t fully revive, you see it as something cyclical and capable of being refreshed. So when do you think we can exepcet some form of black metal renewal, or, more broadly, metal revival? Not sure I see any sign of that quite yet, other than what I mentioned above and some other things. Maybe the “refresh” will take another form than metal…
History cycles, but we cannot return to the past, only re-invent it by finding the “why.”
It’s complex to derive, simple to say, like most big things.
The renewal happens when demand for the real renews, and that’s up to us, really. When we stop buying metalcore, DSBM, alt-metal, emo anything, etc. musicians return to make the good stuff.
I was listening to Transilvanian Hunger the other day, and I noticed how fucking simplistic the music is (almost like evil pop music), but it works perfectly. That’s the key, somehow the whole thing must “work”. It’s not a rocket science, it only needs a “why” as you said.
I think most metal today doesn’t work because everyone and their dog has heard evil/brutality before a million times. Being an edgelord was cool in the 80’s and 90’s, but now it’s a worn out snoozefest. There’s nothing to rebel against anymore.
Sorry, it’s dead Jim, but you knew that already. Best you can hope for are a few bands like Desecresy and Sammath that continue to put out good stuffe every now and then, but don’t expect ridiculous miracles.
In my view, punk was the rebel music. Metal was a search for meaning.
We live in a time with more wrong than ever, but also more right.
Rebellion no longer works for this reason.
The quest for meaning endures, especially the transcendent, which accepts “good” and “evil” as necessary for existence, which is the ultimate good. The good, the beautiful, and the true exist as the result of cycles of loss and natural selection.
The bands now are rehashing the 90s template without any of the content.
In my view, the first step is getting back to the why, and then exploring that in sound. Throw out the 90s playbook; retain the spirit of metal.
Traveling into the past: remembering to forget? Traveling into the future: forgetting to remember?
It is funny how some things are essential, thus eternal. We do “forget to remember” mostly because humanity exists in a constant state of crisis.
ad nauseam fucking sucks
Astonishingly so
The “value reflected” in the current metal scene is negligible, and is astonishingly well represented by the band picture of Anachronism on their bandcamp page.
Ad Nauseam are frustrating because they could be really good if they didn’t choose to suck. I’ll paste my comment here:
I really like the rhythms, pacing and overall songwriting, however the endless dissonant ringing guitars tend to get boring and blend together really fast, making the whole thing utterly riffless. As with all other modern ‘disso’ albums, this is no Obscura. The chaotic frantic schizo atmosphere is achieved much better by simpler and more straight-forward bands like Omegavortex and Degial. It’s a shame because a really cool thing with lots of potential and talent is let down by their pretentious refusal to play some fucking metal riffs.
Pretty good album.