Members' Top Ten Lists
One more of your top ten lists to go. Have we saved the best till last? Well, let's see as we explore the top ten provided by
and starting off, as we always do, at number
10
Filosofem --- Burzum --- 1996
A man whose political views, and his propensity for putting those views into action, landed him in prison on a murder charge, I've never heard anything by Varg Vikernes, but this is apparently the last album he recorded before being sentenced to 21 years in prison for the murder of Mayhem's Euryonmous. It's said to be Black Metal with tinges of ambient and minimalism, so at least it should be interesting. It's also only got six tracks, but then again, one of them is --- wait for it --- twenty-five minutes long! --- so essentially it comes out with a running time about as long as, or longer than, many full albums.
As it opens I'd consider this far more doom metal than black, but what do I know? Well, what I do know is that this is nowhere close to as bad as I feared it would be. Sure, the scratchy, screeching vocal is annoying, but ol' Varg doesn't stick to that all the time, and when he reverts to a “normal” voice he's quite listenable. The music, on the other hand, is pretty damn sweet. It's energentic and hypnotic at once, and catchy as all hell. I'm three tracks in and amazed to say I really love this so far, even given the often hard-on-the-ear vocals. Hey, the guy may be a murderer, a bigot, a racist, an antisemite and a dick, but he can certainly compose and play music!
The third track bores me a little but I love the gentle, minimalistic ambience of the first, what, five? No, ten --- no, fifteen minutes (is it all going to be like this? Twenty minutes now) of this twenty-five minute behemoth. Yeah, that's how it is all the way through. What a masterpiece. Right down my particular boulevard! Man I really enjoyed that. It was totally unexpected and very welcome. The closing track is nearly as good. Hell, I just became a Burzum fan! How the hell did that happen???
And so, suitably shaken but not quite stirred, we move on to Mondo's number
9
Mental funeral --- Autopsy --- 1991
Yeah, this looks like fun. I may have prejudged Burzum --- wrongly --- but I feel this is gonna be like having teeth pulled without anaestetic. By a chimp. Wearing a welding helmet. And boxing gloves. In the dark. On a boat on a storm-tossed sea. Ah
FUCK! FIFTEEN tracks?? Thanks Mondo! Well to be honest, with titles like “I s
hit on your grave” and “sh
it eater” on other albums of theirs, and looking down the tracklist of this one, maybe I've been spared the worst. Also, Wiki says 12 tracks so I'm gonna assume the Spotify version has extra ones which I'll ignore like the girl I am. Twelve is going to be more than enough, going from what I hear here. (Hear, hear!)
Delightful! Another dark growly singer like yer man from Morbid Angel. Guitar work is good though, and it's not all superfast, in fact some of it is almost doom metal slow, like “In the grip of winter” and “Robbing the grave” --- very slowly, it would seem. Oh, I notice a couple of tracks are less than a minute long. Praise be for small mercies! Well again I have to say these guys know how to play, and again at least it's not grindcore. But definitely not my thing. Moving on...
At number
8
we find
Seven chalices --- Teitanblood --- 2009
Which I'll be covering in “The International Language of Metal”, so I'm skipping it, taking us to his number
7
Bath --- Maudlin of the Well --- 2001
This gives me hope, as I see tags such as “progressive”, “avant-garde” and “dark symphonic”. Could be something more in my line, could be a cruel joke. Hmm. Soft gentle opening, keyboards, piano, reverb guitar ... looking good so far. Now as long as nobody comes in kicking and screaming and howling and ruins the atmos I'll be fine. Ooh! Sax! And not wild, uncontrolled, unprotected sax!
Nice low-key, soft, lazy, smoky sax, the kind I like. This is just great so far, though at the moment I'd be struggling to call this metal.
Okay, well now I can. And there's the voice I had hoped not to hear. Ruined everything. Like a different band entirely. Sigh. Oh and now some jazzy horns are getting in on the act. Just gets worse for me, doesn't it?
Third track is totally different, and knocks me further sideways. If I were listening to this blind I would think two different bands were playing. “The Ferryman” starts off great, on some very proggy organ, then kind of stops for about a minute before coming back in on softer organ, some nice guitar and as yet no vocals ---- oh there they are. And they're dark and growly. Why did I not expect this?
Oh but now there's a soft female vocal too. Look, this album is giving me a headache. Too much variety, and not in a good way like with Sigh. I've just settled down when I'm kicked out of my chair, then someone picks me up and rearranges my cushions, hands me the remote before turning the whole thing over again! I'm knackered! And we're not even halfway through! Generally I think this album swings between making sweet love to me and then unaccountably and suddenly becoming a homicidal raving bitch. It''s unsettling, y'know? But I think I love it more than I hate it.