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.
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