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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