Blut aus Nord - Odinist
March 26 2008 at 03:27:31 AM
The transformation of Blut aus Nord from little-known Black Metal group to herald of a new and “forward-thinking” music seems at last to have settled down since the release of their breakthrough album,
The Work Which Transforms God (2003). While still received with a measure of excitement, the band’s recent experiments with Godflesh inspired industrialized trance music and the pedantic serialism of last year’s
M.O.R.T. appears to have let down the once great promise of their arrival. On their latest disc,
Odinism, the band demure slightly and with mixed results.
Even with continued coverage in the music press, Blut aus Nord still remain something of a mystery. Because I speak French as well as they do German, what little insight can be had concomitant to their recordings is available only through extravagantly vain proclamations, stale flirtations with occultism and a confused nativism implied by the group’s name (here duplicated for still mysterious reasons in the album’s title). Like Poland’s Behemoth, they derive inspiration from the works of Aleister Crowley, but associate these with dour notions of transcendence rather than the gaudy showmanship befitting a figure best digested with a pinch of salt. This dual affection appears as two sides of the same coin, “progressive” music being often no less a fraudulent achievement of some higher plateau.
Little surprise then that their musical output begins to feel like reading too long and deep into the damnable Libri themselves. One wants to believe that bad poetry, numerology and a limitless supply of opium holds some kind of answer to our collective mystery, but knows deep down it is not so; that word-play and mysticism - like Heavy Metal – are all too frequently toys for grown men and women. Crowley had his I Ching and magic circles, B.A.N. their touch-guitar and accumulated “research into dissonances.” How much of these merits a second glance is not always so clear at the outcome.
No doubt that behind the cloak of intellectualism, the absurd posturing couched in murky spiritualism, prideful boasts of cosmic intimacy that defines the music’s influence as flowing from below, so above, and the mistaken hubris that anything they do is, or need actually be “new,” that there are small treasures to be found inside of each Blut aus Nord release (Crowley too had his mountain climbs and midnight saturnalia.) But lately these grow fewer and farther between.
Odinist, sub-headed "The Destruction of Reason by Illumination" – The Magus’ definition of madness as taken from an essay on Qabalah - follows the familiar pattern of importing pregnant yet ill-applied terminology as an abstract for pregnant, though hardly vital musical arrangements.
Charted as a return to the controlled excesses of The Work Which Transforms God, Blut aus Nord’s latest is, if nothing else, a smoothened and more unified exercise of the group’s material legerdemain. Yet it only half-succeeds in moving beyond the novelty of founder and guitarist Vindsval’s shapeless muzak.
Orchestrated through a familiar and recurring ambience, distinguished more so by producer Jaz Coleman (Killing Joke) than the arrangements themselves, the music again takes on vague substance; the guitar’s helix-like strands sometimes, but not always reconstitute from mere mathematic swarms into channels of luminously charged melody, trailed by hoarse vocals that propel their incident like a sharp and cavernous wind. The apparent softness of tone and artificial rhythms belie the strength of these gradual ebbs and flows, adding a timeless, chaotic undertow to the compositions. Among them, “An Element of Flesh,” “The Cycle of The Cycles,” and the title track can be counted alongside the most outstanding tracks the band has released. But as much as the group realizes their talent for creating domains of mounting space and unease, they so readily fill them with nothing more than hot air. “Ellipsis” and “Mystic Absolu” confounds bright exception with a superfluous beehive of static leading nowhere in the interval or else abounds in circular reiterations of siren wails and a twisted cacophony. The album’s accompanying intro and outro also fail to sufficiently bookend any would-be concept.
For all their labor and time spent, the band give no more striking a view of their mind’s spindle. It’s all so much friction without any tension, resulting in a style mired in a web of their deluded “theorems.” Odin sacrificed life and limb to gain greater wisdom; it’s taken Blut aus Nord far less to be hailed as visionary. What more will it take to proceed? The good news, maybe, is that no one else cares enough to try.
[Todd DePalma]
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