Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Mass Burial: Dodheimsgard – A Umbra Omega




The latest addition to the Dodheimsgard discography is actually the one I was most excited about hearing, and was honestly the first real serious listen I’d ever given the band. My interest in 2015’s A Umbra Omega was spurred by my absolute love of Aldrahn’s 2014 record with The Deathtrip, the fantastic Deep Drone Master. That is a terrific album that I may get to writing about one day, but for now, it will suffice to say that Deep Drone Master set the table for A Umbra Omega.


As for the Dodheimsgard record specifically, this is like a culmination and perfection of all the things the band was attempting on both 666 International and Supervillain Outcast, turned into one terrific offering. An introduction and five massive tracks add up to almost 70 minutes of experimental black metal perfection. Recently, I gave Ved Buens Ende’s sole album Written in Waters a spin again, and that’s perhaps the biggest touchstone I can think of in terms of what A Umbra Omega “sounds like.” This album is alternatingly mellow and atmospheric, and at other times rages fairly steadily with the tempo and ferocity of what used to be a standard-ish black metal band. Maybe more like an early Ihsahn solo album than anything of Emperor’s, more conventional experimentation within the black metal form than divergent and strange black metal. Maybe something from Solefald.

The five tracks are all over ten minutes long, so they have a lot of room to develop and stretch. As crazy as this may sound, none of the songs overstay their welcomes, despite being so lengthy. Each incorporates a variety of real intriguing elements, and sitting back and picking them apart is exceptionally difficult. Most have some jazzy elements in them, and a saxophone is clearly heard on several occasions. Things plod along, staying long enough to develop a sense of what one is hearing, a quality sometimes absent from records like this one, where it seems the band was in a rush to move on to the next idea or throw in another curve or something, anything other than let the music breathe and be appreciated. The album seethes along for its 70 minutes, leaving that edge-of-seat feeling that a good, atmospheric horror movie provides: that sense that any minute now, something terrifying is going to happen, and you tense and relax in rhythmic accordance with the experience, never knowing when it’s safe, even feeling an unfulfilled relief at the conclusion of every track. Whew, you think, it’s over, just as the next song rumbles into your headphones, and you hold on to something again. Aldrahn at times delivers an absolutely maniacal vocal performance, sounding truly unhinged during the albums’ most uncomfortable moments. That “maniacal performance” bit has been kicked around for years and years and years and years at this point in history, but on this album, it is every bit the truth.

One of the things that got me really keyed up on The Deathtrip album was the vocals, and how they were clear and mostly clean yet brimming with a simmering power and ferocity that Aldrahn must have been straining to contain. It was that performance that made me interested in this album, and there is not really another vocal performance like it in the Dodheimsgard discography. Yeah, there are wild or bizarre vocal moments on 666 International and Supervillain Outcast, but nothing like the ones of A Umbra Omega. Listening to this again and again, my main thought as concerns the vocals is how does one plan this delivery? No one sits there during the writing process and says, “Yeah, I’m going to sing this line in this crazy, deranged fashion,” while another guy in the band is like, “Why don’t you raise your pitch for the first syllable of this word, drop it for the second, and then raise it for the first and third syllables of the next word, but drop it for the second, and . . . “ That just doesn’t happen. What we’ve got here is most probably a totally improvised delivery; a “Here’s the lyrics and here’s the music; you just fit them together and do what your heart tells you to do” arrangement. That horrible and blasé description of black metal vocals sounding like the screaming of asylum inmates is so, so overdone, and I was really hoping that it had died out completely. Yet, hypocrite that I am, the closest thing I can think to call the vocals on A Umbra Omega are periodically the yelling of an asylum inmate, Aldrahn gruffly rasping and shrieking like a truly deranged man. Lyrically, nothing has really changed from the last two outings, so we get that kind of idiot babble philosophy again. “Idiot babble” in the eldritch horror sense, not like a stupid person.

A Umbra Omega takes several listens to really appreciate, as it is not an easy album to ingest. There is no real accessible point, no stand out track of “single,” for absolute lack of a more appropriate concept. And, once listening commences, one needs to stay with it: there’s no drop out spot in this either, so hitting play is signaling ones’ willingness to endure the excursion. There’s something about that that is super satisfying, yet also super daunting. There are plenty of albums that demand ones’ complete attention once they begin, albums that are more experiences than musical offerings. They are multiple, but also somehow rare, many of them being start-to-finish affairs because the listeners’ own decision decrees them so. But this is one of those albums that cannot be paused or left early, as it does not allow for it. Something like (forgive my hipsterish name drops) Gorguts’ Obscura or Weaklings’ Dead But Dreaming, or any Xasthur or Leviathan record,  albums that just don’t have exits that leave you feeling anything less than cheated out of the rest of the listen. That’s A Umbra Omega. Only one entrance, and only one exit, and when the exit comes, a strange feeling of having witnessed something incredible, yet never being able to name what it was. In my younger days, I used to think that was a mark of negative quality, like of a bad album. As I got older, and maybe as the world got crazier and made less and less sense, I began to appreciate these kinds of records more, because they offered this kind of aural Necronomicon experience. To listen to them was to touch something bizarre and unknowably otherworldly, but to understand them lead to madness.

This is 100% an album worth checking out, whether you are a fan of the band or not, or a fan of the style or not, or if you enjoy the stranger kind of listen, or if you’re looking not for haunted house music but something with more bite than a dark ambient recording, more music than sonic landscape. If you’re into the more deviant or electronic ends of the black metal scale, or if you don’t fear delving into something that’s not ‘true’ black metal, I could not recommend this album enough. It is a challenging listen, but well worth the effort and time.

And with that, the second Mass Burial comes to a close. In general, Dodheimsgard was a good experience, but not one that I really feel will stick with me for any duration of time. The only album that I really predict will have legs for me is A Umbra Omega, and even that is a pretty situational listen, as great as it is. It took me forever to get through this Mass Burial, but it was not for lack of interest or lack of care for the project. When I first embarked on it, I was real excited to give Dodheimsgard some more attention, as they have always been on my list of bands to give more time. I really enjoyed the first two albums, which we posted back in either December or January; the next three took me a longer time, but I don’t really have a solid reason as to why. I just fell off the project. Work and new cat and stuff took a lot of my energy, and there were things in real life that were taking up a lot of my mental energies. Honestly, it’s kind of miraculous I’ve held things together as long and as well as I have. Just when I was getting geared up to knock the project out, some things happened at work that took a lot of my brain power, and the strange spring breaks of an adjunct didn’t afford me as much time to write for the Coffin as I’d wanted to. I think these things, along with strong desires to listen to other things more than Dodheimsgard, dragged the effort down. But, ultimately, Dodheimsgard is probably set to occupy that strange strata in my music repertoire, that “I know that band” and can talk about them but don’t have a strong feeling about them strata.

No comments:

Post a Comment