Music

THIS EXISTS: Popul Vuh-inspired underworld synthscapes, Hyperborean realms and other black metal gobbledigook

by Tyler Munro

Every week, This Exists uncovers and explores musical peculiarities that exist in the dark corners of the internet, sometimes just outside the mainstream. Today we take a closer look at Wolves in the Throne Room and Liturgy, two bands that, in spite of their music’s inherent greatness, happen to be the most pretentious buffoons this side of a Mensa meeting.

Black metal is the kind of music that exists solely to upset your parents. It’s scary stuff. Black metal bands burn churches and kill each other. Black metal bands wear the bones of their [D]ead band mates as necklaces and throw animal carcasses into the crowd during live performances. Wait. That’s just Mayhem.

No, black metal, in spite of the mystique that surrounds it, has always been at least a little bit hilarious. It is, after all, an interpretation of a band who, at the height of their controversy and popularity, looked like this:

Still, in spite of the hilarious visual gimmickry and silly KISS inspired corpse-paint, black metal has remained a largely mystifying, predominantly menacing genre, because for every Fenriz there’s a Varg Vikernes: a beer-guzzling party animal and a pretentious, racist murderer. Something for everyone, y’know?

And for decades, these two schisms, the fun-loving and the terrifying, were what complemented black metal. They’re what formed the genre into schisms, one side branching into atmospheric noodling and the other continually turning back the clock and delving into retro-thrash influences. But now, in the Vice Magazine era, we’ve got a third black metal branch, and it’s probably the funniest one yet.

For lack of a better term, let’s call this new branch “pretentiously silly,” because for all its big words, dissertations on occultism and pedantic pandering to, uh, someone (probably), bands like Wolves in the Throne Room and Liturgy are doing all in their power to distract from their otherwise stellar music with their consistently silly bursts of verbal diarrhoea. Take, for example, this press release written to tell writers (like myself) that Wolves in the Throne Room’s new album is nearing completion. (Oh, and breaking news: Wolves in the Throne Room’s new album is nearing completion):

The transmutation reaches a new level with the completion of the album. In contrast to the bleakly hypnotic architecture of Black Cascade, the lifespan of Celestial Lineage breathes more expansive and visionary life into the duo’s work. The WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM trademark long-form approach to arrangement remains intact, but there is a stronger thread of Popul Vuh-inspired underworld synthscapes and star-lit pulse woven with the intertwining guitar figures.

Um…what?

And of the title, rather than simply announcing it, this is how the release reads: “The WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM clan have confirmed the title of this forthcoming astral black metal document as Celestial Lineage.”

Of course at this point you’ll probably say but that’s their publicists. Maybe you’re right. But this next quote comes from the band’s drummer, Nathan. It’s meant to explain the upcoming album’s sound — you decide whether it does or not: “An ornate constellation of imagery is what that guides the songwriting process. Cedar temples crowned with burnished bronze domes glimpsed in a remote valley. Wild Midsummer bonfires and feasting on roasted flesh. All of the sounds serve to evoke the images that exist in our minds eye. With this record we’re going to explore an entirely new palette of sound. We want the instruments to sound like the liturgical music of a cedar cult.”

Before you ask, yes, frequent WITTR collaborator Jessica Kinney’s “liturgical choir and solo voice” will be making an appearance on the album.

Liturgy, who I mentioned earlier, take their pedantry down a different road. Wolves in the Throne Room live in a self-sufficient cabin in the woods somewhere in Washington, but Liturgy is strictly Williamsburg. Hell, their drummer plays with Dan Deacon. Not very metal, I’d say. But of their quotes, their “ideologies,” well, those will probably leave you speechless (mostly because they’ve used up all the good words).

Liturgy calls themselves a “transcendental black metal” band, which probably means something, but to find out what exactly you’ll have to read front man Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s manifesto, which you can also find in black metal philosophy book Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium I. I am absolutely not making this up, by the way.

If you don’t feel like reading the manifesto, and honestly, I don’t blame you, here’s an excerpt to give you a taste of what’s inside (followed by an accompanying chart, because yes, obviously, of course there would be charts in a black metal philosophy book):

Hyperborean Black Metal represents the mountaineer’s arrival at the peak and a supposed leap off of it, directly into the Haptic Void. A total, maximal intensity. A complete flood of sound. An absolute plenitude.

But there he learns that totality is indistinguishable from nothingness. He learns that it is impossible to leap into the horizon. And he is left, crestfallen, frozen and alone, in the Hyperborean realm. It is a dead static place, a polar land where there is no oscillation between day and night. But stasis is atrophy. The Hyperborean realm is dead with purity, totally absolute, selfsame and eternal. The mountaineer undergoes a profound apostasy that he cannot fully understand and arrives at nihilism.

Yes, you just read a confusing two paragraph story of a mountaineer jumping off a cliff and into the Haptic Void (or was it Hyperborean realm? Honestly, I’m not sure). If that wasn’t frightening enough, that’s how the guy actually talks. Don’t believe me? Watch a video interview with Liturgy below and, if you know what’s good for you, hope for the genre’s return to its roots. I’d take six more Burzum prison albums over more rants like this.

(Oh, and that part when Hunter Hunt-Hendrix says the band doesn’t wear corpsepaint? That’s a lie.)