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.

Mass Burial: Dodheimsgard -- Supervillain Outcast

 

Supervillain Outcast is the second attempt at experimental Black Metal from Norway’s Dodheimsgard, and is generally shunned. Released in 2007, a whopping eight years after 666 International, much of the scene had moved beyond the band, and a fairly common thought was that Dodheimsgard was now trying to do something different for attention. By 2007, the “acceptable” form of experimental Black Metal was changing once again, and this time, aided by the Internet, the change was soon to be accompanied by a mandate that it was ok for bands to be identical to each other and still classify as unique, so long as they were widely unknown by the general masses. The Cascadian scene was beginning to stir, and Black Metal was growing tamer and more generally acceptable in its tamer form.

Mass Burial: Dodheimsgard - Satanic Art EP and 666 International

By the late 1990s, black metal scenes around the world were beginning to settle in to what they would ultimately be known for and as. A sense of normalcy, relatively speaking, was blanketing the genre, and the biggest genre shake up was coming in the form of exacerbations of preexisting black metal conditions, things like the rise and sudden popularity of the symphonic strain of black metal, or the initial rumblings of blackened thrash. Some of the original Norwegian bands like Enslaved and Emperor were beginning to move in different directions conceptually, and incorporating different elements and influences, but there wasn’t really anything that was really startling. So Emperor was getting a bit more symphonic, or Enslaved was getting a bit more psychedelic. But then, it happened.

Mass Burial: Dodheimsgard, Monumental Possession

The second Dodheimsgard album, 1996s’ Monumental Possession, is a total step back for a band whose debut album showed moments of promise and brilliance. 

Kronet til Konge was that, despite a handful of sit-up-and-pay-attention moments, I could not quite put a finger on anything concretely solid about the album. I listened to it over and over, and was always pleased, but was never able to define the things that caught my attention. Monumental Possession is easily quantified though. This is the album wherein Dodheimsgard tried to make a straightforward Norwegian black metal record, the same kind as the majority of their peers, veering away from the experimentalism of contemporaries and first wave Norwegians like Isengard and heading for the territories already staffed by Darkthrone. Even the artwork is "another Norwegian black metal record" artwork.

Mass Burial: Dodheimsgard, Kronet til Konge

Second wave Norwegian Black Metal was a hell of a scene. For a while there, everyone played in everyone else’s band, so that the first albums from Mayhem and Burzum and Darkthrone and Emperor and Immortal all sounded sort of similar while maintaining enough distance between them so as to prevent them from all being ‘the same band’. But the cross pollination of musicians is a difficult thing to keep straight, as so many of them participated in one recording for a band that was not their own, primary outfit. This was due to there being so few Black Metal musicians at the dawn of the Norwegian scene, and is honestly pretty cool, lending a real clubhouse type vibe to those early records, knowing they are collaborations between not-yet-but-soon-to-be legendary figures.