DUG OUT - Classics from the Depths no.1

DUG OUT - Classics from the Depths no.1

The blogging section of the site has proceeded in a start-stop manner now for the best part of a year, and it’s fair to say that it’s yielded mixed results.

Personally, I thought Fiacra’s epic account of a trip to see the mighty Manilla Road in Belgium wins hands down in terms of just being a great read, with Donal’s passionate declaration of love towards In Solitude’s debut album being close behind it.

I haven’t been writing a great deal in blog form mainly because the forum always has the edge in terms of quickly disseminating news about bands, gigs and releases, and me repeating that sort of stuff in blog form seems kind of pointless.

However, as metal fans, one thing we can uniformly agree on is the satisfaction that pulling out a neglected old classic from the music collection can bring. In this series of blog posts, I’ll do my best to give an outlook on what I deem to be albums that are not only excellent musically, but have had a particular personal value attached to them.

That is to say they’re releases that have a special aura about them and remind you of a particular time and place. Seeing as this is the first ‘Dug Out’ post, I’ll kick things off with two releases, one of which is a quite recent and by a group still relatively swathed in obscurity, and the other being a bone fide classic of the mid 90’s.

In The Woods… ‘Omnio’

I pulled this gem out of the CD stack about a month ago, ripped it onto the mp3 player and promptly forgot about it. But it got a listen about a week ago and has been on heavy duty rotation ever since.

Someone on the forum once described the Norwegians on this album as trying to shove so many ideas and progressions into a what’s still essentially a Metal album that it’s almost bursting at the seams, but still works so well.

I was still pretty young when ‘Omnio’ was released, and will continuously hate the fact that I missed their legendary gig with Katatonia in Dublin all those years ago.

However, that doesn’t diminish one iota how indulgently sublime it is as a record, as well as how off-the-wall and genuinely adventurous it sounds despite our now distant viewpoint.

The opener, ‘’299,796 KM/S’’ is undeniably a sprawling mess of a song. This should most definitely not put you off though, as the richness of what the band present to the listener is made abundantly clear after just a few minutes.

The fact that vocalist Transeth comes floating into the song with what is essentially a yodel at the two minute mark, instantly presenting a passionate, raw duet with “Soprana” Larson’s lilting tones before a break of tremolo aggression comes pounding through gives a good indication of how untamed their expression is going to be on this record.

It’s effect has not dulled over a decade and a half since it was recorded, still tugging at the listener’s heartstrings in all the right ways.

It’s probably true to say that the majority of the Metal fraternity probably prefer In the Woods…’s first album, ‘Heart of the Ages’, to this sophomore effort. A similarly impressive album, it married the atavistic roar of early Burzum with an expansive sound that simply didn’t exist up until that point.

But more than that, that album presented the band as a complete aesthetic package, coming complete with naturalist mission statement and earnest photos of the band gathered around nocturnal bonfires. Many people have accused Wolves in the Throne Room of pilfering the band’s early image, and no without good reason.

The crucial difference is that ‘Omnio’ showed that In the Woods had the ability to shift from their sylvan cradle of “forests so cold” to the broad world beyond and diversify their sounds accordingly.

It’s not hard to hear the tinges of ‘70s progressive rock and psychedelia at the fringes of this album, a theme that the group were soon to fully recognise with inclusion of a cover of ‘White Rabbit’ in their live set and a set of involved musicians that were almost a collective in their numbers.

In many ways, the only way to properly enjoy ‘Omnio’ is to just get lost in it. I’ve had reason to take many late night bus journeys in the past weeks for various reasons (often with a few scoops taken), and this just works perfectly as a soundtrack as the lights of Dublin Airport stream by in the night.

It is the sort of record that demands attention, and sitting down to listen to just a single track is somewhat pointless, rather like watching a single scene in a long and distended movie.

In fact the lack of normal chorus and verse sections often makes the record feel like it’s a lot longer than it’s hour length suggests, as movement after movement lilts by.

The space-rock elements of ‘Omnio – Bardo’, the second of the trilogy of songs that close the album is just one of the many moments of heedless expression. It’s obvious after a single listen that the band were content to do things their own way and forget all and any objections.

Sometimes you catch yourself thinking that they’re taking it a bit too far and should really rein it in a bit, but that’s to miss the spirit of the record.

There’s real freedom way that Transeth stalks his way across the tracks, caught in mental torment of while female backing vocals and guitar effects lament in the background. Call it what you might, but it’s got certainly got buckets of heart.

So what about the highlights? It’s hard to choose in an album of so many differing musical peaks.

The transition in ‘I Am Your Flesh’ from the opening snarl of distorted aggression to the emotive line of “How Can I Feel Love / When Love was Something I Never Had?” is a personal favorite, and in a way that transition encapsulates the nature of that strange group of bands that In The Woods was part of in Norway.

Taking the raw fury of their native brand of Black Metal and injecting emotions and sounds that would seem completely alien to the forebears of that genre was seemingly the name of the game in the mid ‘90s.

It’s easy to see the similarities between this particular record and others by their countrymen who populated the Misanthropy Records roster, such as the deeply melancholic ‘Pity Love’ by Beyond Dawn and the willful oddness of Ved Buens Ende’s ‘Written in Waters’.

Often forgotten under the shock factor of the Black Metal events of Norway in the early nineties, the fact that the same country spawned this brilliant brand of avant-garde weirdness deserves similar focus and appreciation.

‘Omnio’ certainly sounds of the era it was made in. But beneath the new-age 90’s stylings of the cover art and the bands frumpy appearance at the time, they knew how to write powerful and epic songs that defy the listener’s expectations.

As such, they deserve to be cherished as much today as ever. Over six tracks and a wide gamlet of textures and soaring melodies, the record remains a lasting monument to the levels of musical ecstacy a bunch of frumpy teenagers from Kristiansand could reach when they put their minds to it.

Check out a raw but great rendition of the opening track here, complete with Transith at his extravagant best.

The Ruins of Beverast - ‘Foulest Semen of a Sheltered Elite’

This one certainly hasn’t stood the test of time yet to be viewed as a classic, but it is one that got a lot of spins in 2009 and was dug out for the first time in a while last week as the foulest weather of a shitty climate returned to Dublin. I’m glad I did give it another run through, as it’s as rewarding a listen as I’ve heard in a long time.

Ruins of Beverast have been on the go now for some time, being the one man project of Alexander von Meilenwald and having released two previous albums that were quite highly praised. Of those, ‘Unlock the Shrine’ in the one which I can vouch for, being a relatively orthodox Black Metal record blessed with a dark and unwholesome atmosphere.

Special attention given to slow, twisted melody over speed particularlly marks it out as being well worth investigating. The thing about ‘Foulest Semen…’ is that is departs from this template to a significant degree, positioning Mellenwald in a strange area of overlapping styles that really is quite unique.

The opening track, ‘I Raised This Stone as a Ghastly Memorial’ is the undoubtedly the showboat of the album, and its doleful opening and choral vocals proceed to set the tone. The vocals employed here are seriously striking, being a mix of monkish chanting that veers close to an almost ‘80’s Goth style of croon.

It’s an odd one to be sure, but mixed with necrotic pronunciations and hypnotic guitar passages, it builds up to an absorbing climax, slowly striking gold all the way.

The album is a long one, but in a similar way to ‘Omnio’, it packs a different punch at every turn. Things run the gauntlet from ripping inferno on ‘God’s Ensanguined Bestiaries’ to what is essentially a clutch of very effective melodic numbers towards the end of the album that are nonetheless dolefully nihilistic in their tone.

None of the tracks proper fall under eight minutes, so attention is required but rewarded throughout, as the skeletal intonations of Mellenwald arch over a landscape of twisting riffs and elusive melodies.

It’s the difficultly one can experience with this album in pinning it down that makes coming back to it so compulsive. There are outright great songs on it, but even after plenty of listens, it’s hard to come to terms with it as a contained album, as the songs bleed into each other in a very unconventional manner. It seems clear that the music’s architect has managed to tap into a very expansive well of eldtricht sound.

Those clean choruses of blasting noise seem wrapped up somewhat in the velvety smooth production that wash over the listener, with the insistence of a sample at the start of the final track that ‘’Your Body is Losing All Sensation…’’ seeming to hit the mark with eerie accuracy.

It is an atmospheric listen, but one that’s in constant shift. The change in cover art from the previous albums of usual BM style to the almost absurdly cartoonish yet somehow disquieting art on this one seems well timed. The vinyl edition itself comes with a bonus track of ‘Where the Serpents Ever Dwell’ by Tiamat, a band whose early spirit is alluded to here in subtle but unmistakable ways.

A varied yet engrossing listen, the sheer scale and richness of this one makes coming back to it an easy thing to do. A definite one that you need to be in the mood for, but if you fancy something interesting to chew on, then look no further.