Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Coffin Shaker: Vardan - Winter Woods



Vardan – Winter Woods

                Vardan is an Italian one man black metal project whose main philosophy on releases is to put out a new album seemingly every month. As of this writing, 2015 alone has seen six albums, with a seventh on the way in like two weeks. Vardan follows the, dare I say, traditional depressive black metal formula of longer songs, so while each album ranges from three to seven songs, the general length is around the thirty minute mark. While my initial thought is that fewer albums of more songs would be a better idea, I can’t honestly say that anything suffers with Vardan as a result of splitting things up. Most depressive black metal albums, with very few exceptions, suffer from a high sense of repetition: this is a genre that is primarily about moods and atmospheres, and too much of that for too long winds up being just more of the same. Things get boring fast with this type of music, too much at once or in too extended of a serving makes for a challenge to keep listening. It’s possible that Vardan figured this out, and decided to split up his works into more manageable and consumable portions. The abundance of releases does lead one to think that there’d be some real debatable quality to the individual albums, but that hasn’t been the case at least as far as I’ve heard.
                The thing I really like about Vardan is that he’s got that sonic quality that sets the good bands of this style apart from the rest. Depressive black metal, for me, is more about the general feeling the music conveys: it’s moody and sullen, and it possesses a sort of coldness that is more of an emotional quality than whatever ‘cold grimness’ the more traditional Norwegian second wave bands had. Remember those days? Remember when cold and grim were the default adjectives on stickers adorning the shrink wrap of a Darkthrone album and you were all like “Hell yes, cold and grim and black metal.” Lol. Those were good days to be sure, but I never really understood the ‘cold’ part. It generally seemed like some cheesy tie in to Norway’s climate more than anything that pertained to the music itself. But Vardan is getting that cold part right, the same way that bands like Xasthur and Leviathan always managed that atmospheric cold, letting it come through in the music generally as some ambient element. Way too much DSBM employs fairly inane shrieking and sub-demo quality recording to try to get that feeling in the mix; Vardan has that type of ambient part to his music that really makes this genre successful, and memorable honestly. I may not be walking down the street whistling a Vardan tune, but repeated listens yield that feeling of having heard this before in the good, comfortable and, in the case of quality depressive black metal, melancholic way. Vardan also has a way of weaving in some acoustic or at very least not distorted guitar parts to create some separation between the parts of his songs, and that is something that lets these songs meander around in a less repetitive and more interesting way.
                All of that being said, in my experiences thus far, one Vardan album is like another Vardan album, and that’s not meant to be an insult. Quality is quality, and while I keep returning to Vardan’s albums in general, they don’t offer the type of memorable separation that the various Xasthur records do, or the more ambient and unsettling Leviathan records do. I may never bother to write about Vardan again, but every three or four weeks when he puts out something new, I’ll definitely be listening.

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