Fanisk - Insularum (2013)

Fanisk break the decade of silence following their well-regarded 2003 offering Noontide with the entrancing, audacious Insularum.

Fanisk are labelled an NSBM band (unsurprising, given that Noontide's cover displayed a huge swastika), but the duo of Vitholf (lyrics, vocals) and Eldrig (all instruments) self-describe their work as "Black Solar Art".  This is a conscious decision to distance themselves from the herd of typical, reactionary NSBM garbage.   You won't find any anti-Zionist rants or panzer-fueled genocidal fantasy of "mud races" on Insularum, nor will you hear the half baked "riffs", recorded in no-fi and recycled ad nauseum, that most NSBM "propaganda efforts" are guilty of peddling.  If one absolutely must connect Fanisk to Aryan ideology, they have far more in common with the pre-Hitler Ariosophic blood mysticism of the likes of Guido von Liszt and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (who believed that their Aryan heritage held the key to spiritual transcendence) and the Hitler-as-avatar quasi-historical reinterpretations of Savitri Devi and Miguel Serrano, than the gun-toting, inbred-and-loving-it skinhead posturing of modern neo-Nazi music groups.  And even then, these connections serve as mere thematic guideposts, for Fanisk do not seem to share (or if they do, do not outwardly express) the questionable anti-Semitic scapegoating that the aforementioned authors could not refrain from adding into their theories.  In fact, the only explicit reference to race in Fanisk's oeuvre comes from their first record Die and Become (2002), which mentions a fiery hammer held in a "white hand".

Instead, the pet themes of Fanisk's previous works of black solar art have been mythological and metaphysical: the upholding of ancient and eternal Law as seen in play of the globe's natural forces (wind, winter, fire, the stars) in their constant dance of creation and annihilation.

These themes have not been abandoned on Insularum, but they have been transmuted into a new and curious form.  Rather than cosmic cycles, this album speaks of interior vastness, of islands of perfection (to which the Latin title refers) that lie close at hand within the mind and yet seem so distant and alien, and of the grand isolation, both wonderful and terrifying, inherent in the search for, and attainment of, these inner worlds.  Translated, the quote from Klaus Kinski that opens the record tells us “I long to go forth from here to another world,” but a repeated lyric assures us that "Lonesome is the ray/way of the return" to that eternal realm.

The transcendent journey of Insularum begins, fittingly, with "Departure Rose Golden" and ends with "Arrival Lotus Black"; however, the album is one continuous piece of music and its division into three long tracks is pretty much arbitrary.  (The actual separations both occur right in the middle of a passage and are unnoticeable unless you are watching the track time count down digitally.)  To call Eldrig the band's guitarist does him a disservice, because he does not so much write riffs as create holistic compositions.  With perhaps the exception of the digitized drums, which never do too much to stand out, he has given each instrument equal consideration and importance within the whole.  The sprightly, energetic keyboard arrangements are not mere flourishes stacked on top of the brawny yet melodic guitars, but rather an integral part of the structure.  Vitholf's harsh vocals are passable, if unremarkable, and low in the mix, but his clean singing, which pops up more than a handful of times, is much more intriguing.

Eldrig's style of writing has much more in common with classical music than heavy metal. (Richard Wagner is undoubtedly an influence, compositionally and conceptually.)  Musical themes are introduced, then further explored and developed until they become new ideas.  Passages are skilfully explored in new contexts, which gives Insularum an evolving sense of unity, rather than stale repetition.  Just to name an example, the soaring main melodic theme of "Departure Rose Golden" that is introduced in the overture (yes, there's an overture), is later re-purposed, this time using calmly drifting acoustic guitar, as a transition into album's second major movement.  Then much later, about a third of the way into "Arrival Lotus Black", a melody emerges that is reminiscent of this main theme, but is barely recognizable as such, as it has transformed to become even more powerful and effective.  Eldrig's greatest trick is to move past a memorable stretch of music, only to have it later reappear, reborn in a higher form.  This is highly appropriate, given Fanisk's lyrical obsession with spiritual ascendance. 

The musical composition on Insularum possesses a great sense of power and strength, but is tempered with surprising grace and elegance.  That said, not everything works well.  Near the middle of the album there is a section of floating, wave-like ambiance that is occasionally punctuated by one-note staccato bursts.  I'm sure this ties in conceptually to the piece, but as a listener, it tends to drag on.

As previously mentioned, the predominant lyrical themes are the desire to transcend the mundane world and the struggles and triumphs of the inner journey toward the Eternal within oneself.  Though this atmosphere of meditative introspection and interior exploration comes across clearly enough, most of Vitholf's individual lines are largely inscrutable.  He seems determined to pepper his lines with Latinisms, and in general to use purposefully obscure word choices.  Here are a few examples, cherrypicked from throughout the album: "Elusive bands, diaphan amble / Delineate evaporous convex", "Envelop whole, marmoreal / Quell aphonic, depth profound", "Sinistrogyre, reel the camber / Involution, drawn recondite."  You get the idea.  However, he sometimes switches tactics and attempts passages of stately, regal lines that, in their style, resemble (or mimic...) Goethe, or Romantic poetry in general:

Traveled I, far as form would carry,
And came no closer, I to thee…
For shatterest thou, exact and utter,
The vessel last with which to seize
The profundity of this mad inquiry…
And yet, this instant, cruel entire,
Illumine ache in mystic fire
Revealing thy proximity. 

Whether any of this this will actually appeal to you probably depends on how far you think Vitholf has his head up his own ass.

Indeed, if all of what I've described of Insularum sounds incredibly audacious, perhaps even a touch overblown, that's because it is.  I can easily see many people writing off this album as pretentious and overwrought.  But hey, you can't create a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk of this magnitude if you don't have huge balls and ambition to spare.  And you don't become the Nietzschean ubermensch by being humble and unassuming.

I have not yet mentioned the title of Insularum's second track, "Enantiodromia", taken from a concept developed by the inimitable C.G. Jung, because I want to tie it into my closing remarks.  Enantiodromia can be summarized thusly:

"Literally, 'running counter to,' referring to the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time. This characteristic phenomenon practically always occurs when an extreme, one-sided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition is built up, which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control."

The point I wish to make is that Insularum embodies this concept within the evolution of Fanisk's whole body of work.  If you'll pardon the over-intellectual analysis of what is essentially contrarian babble intoned over grown men playing their instruments as fast and as ugly as they can...:

Black metal, as both a musical style and the general philosophical orientation of the individual personalities performing it, is the outpouring of extreme negativity.  In other words, it's full of those "extreme, one-sided tendencies" mentioned above.  From Satan worship to suicidal ideation to neo-Nazism, most black metal musicians use their art as a means to revel in their dark side.  Their shadow, to put it in Jungian terms.  Fanisk's earlier work dealt thematically with destructive power, finding beauty in the necessary annihilation of outward, material forms.  But in the 10 years that have passed since Noontide was released, a counterposition has developed, as it must, and this is expressed in the new-found contemplative themes on Insularum.

Keeping in mind Jung's ideas regarding the full development of the personality through the reconciliation of the opposites therein, perhaps it is fitting that Fanisk have disbanded after releasing this ultimate work of Black Solar Art, after the long journey of uniting their shadow with their inner light.  If such is the case, what else remains that they could say?

Away, away! Away from all ways! Away, the way! (VBR)

Coffinworm - When All Became None (2010)

Low down and dirty doom/sludge from the USA.  Coffinworm are pure negativity and hatred for everyone and everything.  They revel in pain, destruction, and hopelessness.  Their slow tempo riffs sound like being dragged through a thick, noxious swamp, bloated, decaying bodies floating on top, tangles of rusty barbed wire lurking below the surface, nowhere to escape in any direction.  All that, agonizingly drawn out, giving the cries of pain time to echo through the mire.  But the band is also capable of operating their brand of ultra-negativity at more conventionally rock-y speeds, such as on the main riff of "Start Saving For Your Funeral" (a song whose title reflects its understated but noticeable current of pitch black humor).  Furthermore, after opening with a sample from the classic 1970 freaked-out-murderhippies-with-rabies film I Drink Your Blood (horror movie references and samples are recurring themes), final track "The Sadistic Rites of Count Tabernacula" breaks into a comparatively brisk section that one could say borders on black n' roll (or whatever) before once again giving way to crawling doom.  While When All Became None is predominately a slow, sludgy affair, these varied tempos give some heft and variety to an album that, without them, would be a competent but unmemorable genre exercise.

The drumming is not at all flashy and never really does much to call attention to itself, but provides a solid backbone for the guitars to work their pummeling magic.  I particularly like the less distorted sections when the tone becomes a down-tuned, swampy twang.  Vocals go back and forth between higher pitched throat shredding and a rumbling death metal growl.  The lyrics stand out for their sheer bleakness, fanatically welcoming and urging on the un-becoming of all existence.  Here's just one of my favorite gems to be found on the album, taken from opener "Blood Born Doom": "I deny both idols and hope / I reject this holy hoax / At the end of my noose / Fuck the Son, long live the Beast".

Two of When All Became None's six tracks are carried over Coffinworm's inaugural demo release, 2009's Great Bringer of Night.  Then two other tracks from the LP were tacked on to the 2012 re-release of said demo.  In all, that's 7 songs stretched across three separate releases.  That level of recycling of material might raise some eyebrows, but when the music's this good I can forgive it.  Who fucking cares?  We're all doomed anyway.

Putrid breath of life, how I hate you.

Fuck you forever (320)

Lascowiec - Unbroken Spirit (2011)

Lascowiec: a Slavonic woodspirit who protects the animals of the forest, taking the form of a wolf riding atop another wolf.

Lascowiec: a band playing a style of cosmic black metal much indebted to the Russian Blazebirth Hall style (yet still maintaining its own identity).  If you're familiar with Angkor Vat, the band Lascowiec evolved out of, this is much of the same.  The drums are hollowed out and buried almost to the point of being subliminal.  The two guitars interlock, spiraling ever upwards, through misty clouds of ethereal synth (which are, thankfully, not overdone), forming a mystical bridge between the astral realm of eternal forms, and our profane world in which we must prove our worth to the ancients through conflict and triumph of will.  Only through the strife of battle can we achieve our spiritual ascension.

The band have put out a good number of releases on cassette and CD, of which this is probably the most solid.  They possibly have some NS ties so if that bothers you, you might want to skip this one.  (Or you could stop being such a prissy baby).  Their sound is simultaneously romantic and hateful, raw and atmospheric.  If you're into BBH, you'll want to check this out.  Their stuff that is still available for purchase is not too hard to find.  Not much else to say, really.

The will to resist (VBR)

I Hate Myself - Three Songs (2005)

Many people are prone to ask: were Gainesville, FL's I Hate Myself a "joke band"?

Surely any band with such a name that shrieks lines like "60 watts, brighter than my future / An empty forty, fuller than my life" or "I can survive.../ but I don't know / if I want to" had to be making fun of 90's emo bands' penchant for childish melodrama, rather than a sincere expression of such.  If he were being earnest, the singer clearly would have offed himself long ago, right?

Or so the line of thinking goes.

This mindset is inherently reductive and useless.  To be certain, the band's lyrics were often self-deprecating to the point of being comically over the top.  But to suggest that they could only be one of two things, a detached put-on drenched in irony or a sincere cry for help from someone with a major depressive disorder about to blow his head off, betrays a total blindness to the band's modus operandi, as well as a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of capital A art.

Any listener worth his salt will realize that I Hate Myself's lyrics are written from a specific narrative voice necessarily distinct from the real life human being who wrote them.  This is a voice where fact and fiction are blurred together, where legitimate Bad Feelings and black humor are two necessary sides of the same coin.  There is a point deep in the depressive cycle where one realizes that his or her depression is so extreme as to become totally absurd and, in a fucked up sort of way, actually really funny.  This is the emotional space from which I Hate Myself send their lyrical dispatches.  And to insist on determining their real-world veracity refuses to acknowledge the band as the artists they are.  IHM are at once serious and joking, crying and laughing, "real" and "fake".  It cannot be otherwise.

Okay, you can now forget about all of that nonsense, because not much of it really applies to the EP in question.  Three Songs was I Hate Myself's final recorded output, released well after the rest of their catalog.  It makes sense, then, that it is a departure from their earlier work.  These three tunes use lightning as a metaphor for the intense power of love and longing, but not in the way you might expect.  This is the story of a love affair between a man and a lightning bolt.

Roy Sullivan holds the world record for number of times being struck by lightning.  Seven.  Seven times (which, once we know he was a veteran park ranger, is only slightly more understandable).  And he survived them all.  Three Songs'...well, songs... are written within this narrative framework.  The lightning, for whatever reason, is romantically attracted to Roy, and he must deal with the destructive consequences of this attraction.  IHM handle this concept with lyrical depth and precision, if not subtlety.  On the final track, the lightning is given a chance to speak, and simply pines "I love you / Love me too" as the song builds to a crescendo.

But then again, Roy Sullivan himself knew a thing or two about how it feels when someone cannot love you back.  At the age of 71, despite surviving more lightning strikes than any human being in recorded history, he chose to end his life over an unrequited love.  Go figure.

Is this bliss? (256)

Mamaleek - Kurdaitcha (2011)

Mamaleek are two anonymous brothers from San Francisco who play a mixture of black metal, jazz, and world music.  Kurdaitcha, their third album (whose name refers to the office of "ritual executioner" among some Australian Aboriginal peoples) has fewer jazz elements than their previous work, but is the most streamlined and easily listenable.

The shuffling electronic percussion at times sounds like, oddly enough, a cross between ritualistic drumming and witch house-y programming.  Throughout the course of this album you will encounter strangely trilling wind instruments (some type of flute?), sampled chanting in what sounds like German, blackened dungeon-scraping noise, and, during the anthemic highpoint of penultimate track "The White Marble Stone," rhythms slightly reminiscent of hip-hop.

Just an observation: the fuzzed out ending of "My Body Rock Long Fever" would sound right at home on My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, complete with a final loop that calls to mind "Touched"...

These are all disparate parts of Kurdaitcha, but as a whole there is really nothing to compare it to.  This album demands to be taken on its own terms.  Mamaleek are one of the most unique, curious bands I've had the pleasure of hearing.

One more note: to my knowledge I was the first person to realize (or at least the first to post on the internet about it) that all of Mamaleek's song titles are taken from old negro spirituals.  I don't really know what to make of that, but there it is.

Kurdaitcha is available as a pay-what-you-want download from the always superb Enemies List Home Recordings.

Or, you can get it as a direct download below:

Trance soul journeys to the realm of spirits (192).

They Might Be Giants - Apollo 18 (1992)

It took me about 15 years to realize how weird Apollo 18 is.  Having been exposed to it as a small child (I have no memory of the first time I heard it; to me, it has simply always been), I had no frame of reference for its insular strangeness disguised in pop and rock trappings.  Sure, I knew the words, but I was unable to separate the lyrical landscape from the bouncy, catchy music.  Upon revisiting the album as a grown n' sexy adult, it was now clear.  This is 45 minutes of two weird, possibly probably mildly autistic dudes dropping you into the sea of circular linguistic abstractions and curious situational hyperspecifics that exist within their inscrutable headspaces.

Take the lyrics to "The Statue Got Me High" out of the context of its upbeat instrumental (dig that tuba work), and you have an ominous tale of monolithic possession and destroyed psyche.  Even Flansburgh, usually the more conventional of the two Johns, gets waaaay out there on the creepy, foreboding "Hall of Heads" while still remaining white-boy-fawnky.  Yet despite the sinister edge underlying most of the songs, this remains a toe-tapping, fun listening experience.  There's even a couple of "normal" tunes; the biology lesson "Mammal" is a precursor to their later-career material oriented toward educating children, and "Narrow Your Eyes" is an earnestly straightforward lament to love diminished by time and bitterness.

Musically, the songs branch out into a lot of different territories.  Imagine if Ween were socially dysfunctional eggheads building worlds inside their heads as they daydreamed in the back of class, instead of socially dysfunctional shitheads huffing glue and chuckling like Beavis and Butt-head in the back of class annoying the hell out of everyone, and you'll have a vague idea of what this sounds like.

The interstitial snippets of "Fingertips" were originally meant to be scattered throughout the album while listening to it on shuffle, but here I have left them as a single combined track.  Strung back to back to back etc., they become pleasurably disorienting.

Looking back, I wonder if absorbing such a bizarre album at such a young age had anything to do with me becoming the weirdo I am today.  I sure hope so.

If you've never listened to They Might Be Giants and only know the name, start here.  If you can't find anything about Apollo 18 to appreciate, they are probably not for you.

Let's get weird (320).

Enslaved by Owls - III - Trip the Light Phantasm (2008)

Enslaved by Owls is a one man project creating what could be soundtracks to psychedelic horror films that don't exist.  However, this is much more than mere Goblin worship.  His own description sums things up well: "Human Synth, Organ, Guitar, Drum Programming, LSD, Graveyards."  EBO is frequently goofy, often spooky, and always off-kilter.

Force fed 13 hits of Black Pentagram Acid, stuffed into a coffin, and buried alive.
Snorting crushed werewolf bones (it feels similar to ketamine) in a cobwebbed mausoleum.
Trapped, paralyzed in the back of a hearse that is, for some reason, chasing after another hearse (or is it the same hearse?).
Alien mold spores invading your mucus membranes and exploding out your orifices.
Struck by a weird freezing moonbeam, transformed into an eternal statue.

If all this sounds intriguing, you've got your work cut out for you; Enslaved by Owls has released seven full lengths, all available on Bandcamp.  There's no real best way to proceed with this strange body of work, so I've chosen III largely at random.  Light some black candles, and let the otherness wash over you.

III - Trip the Light Phantasm (320)