Geist ist teufel --- Urfaust --- 2004 (GoatowRex)
Recommended by Ninetales
I find myself getting less and less sure of myself. I’ve heard bands described as “ambient black metal” who didn’t sound in the least ambient to me, "melodic death metal" in which I can discern no melody, and "Viking metal" that often sounds very close to Power Metal. and here we have another, the debut album from Urfaust who, despite their German sounding name, are actually Dutch. The album only has six tracks, though one is ten minutes long and the closer is fifteen, so I hope I end up liking this!
We open with the appropriately-titled “Intro”, which has deep booming synth I think, a witchy-sounding dark voice which appears to be chanting rather than singing, and no percussion yet. Sounds like the sort of thing you would fear coming across if you wandered into a creepy abandoned church after dark. Brr! Can just see the high priest raising the knife above the female sacrificial victim as he prepares to plunge it into her heart. Melody, such as it is, maintains the same eerie, pulsing beat as the chanting goes on. Ok, well
EM says they only have guitar, drums and vocals, so I guess that was guitar echo or feedback or something. As the first “real” track gets going the vocal changes to a high-pitched, almost desperate shriek, and you can clearly hear the guitar now as “Die kalte Teufelsfaust” takes us into almost seven minutes of creepy, weird music.
The vocal does descend from that unnerving shriek through to a lower, more gutteral and yet more discernible sound, but then climbs back up. As with the opener, the guitar seems to maintain the same riff throughout, and again the vocal is almost more chanting than singing. Oddly enough, I kind of detect tinges of Spanish vocalists here. I’m not saying you’re listening to Julio Iglesias, but the inflections seem very peculiarly Spanish. The drums get a bit more manic now, as does the vocal, as we come to the end of the track, and “Drudenfuß” is almost exactly the same length. Coincidence? Whatever, this one is far more upbeat and has a harder, more prominent guitar, much further up and cleaner in the mix. Seems like some sort of jig or traditional song. Mucho weird. As if this album could get any weirder.
At least the guitar begins to break out of its rut here; up to now, it’s been basically holding the one pattern of chords, now there’s a solo and a bit of a different riff. Though it returns to it fairly quickly, it’s good to see that IX, one half of the duo that make up this band, can flex his (assume he’s male) musical muscles a little. IX also provides the vocals, so perhaps we shouldn’t judge his guitar playing too harshly. I have of course no idea what the song titles mean, but this definitely sounds like some sort of folk song, probably best indulged in after several pints of the local ale. Sounds like a flute there, but none is credited and with no synth either I’ll just have to put it down to an effect on the guitar.
That ten-minuter is up next, and “Auszug aller tödlich seinen Krafte” (if anyone who can speak Dutch and/or German would like to translate these titles for me, please help yourself) starts off slow and moody, with a heavy distorted guitar backdrop and sparse drumming from the weirdly-named (is everything about this album weird?) VRDRBR --- I don’t even know how you pronounce that, so if I have cause to refer to him, or it, again, I’ll call him Vader. Why? Why not? I wouldn’t presume to label this a ballad --- after all, it’s ten minutes long and we’re only into the second of those; there’s plenty of time for it to kick up and change tempo, possibly more than once --- but so far it’s a slow, doomy, almost bluesy piece with what must be credited as a half-decent vocal. No demonic screams at any rate. Well, not yet.
Something of Nick Cave in this, specially in the vocal, but the guitar seems again content to play the same riff into at least the fifth minute. Well those screams are back in the sixth minute, but thankfully they don’t last long at all. Everything stops now as the guitar descends like a falling banshee or a diving Stuka, then a sound like a buzzsaw or drill followed by sirens and weird scary screechy noises reminds me in part of Vangelis’s “Beauborg”. Man, that scared me when I were younger. Probably still would. Sounds like backward masking now, some bell sounds and then a horror-film soundtrack which really sounds like it’s on violin, and if this IX guy is producing all these sounds on the frets then all I can say is that he is actually one hell of a guitarist, even given the limited playing he has produced up to now.
With some more mad screams, a kind of low male vocal chorus and some more heavy guitar we’re out and into the title track. A moaning chant with a big spacey sound that fills the room gives us a slow start, very doom meets drone; you could certainly see this on the soundtrack to some bad horror movie or documentary. There’s a vaguely arabic lilt to the chant, though that could just be me. I would definitely have thought cellos or violins though, but none are mentioned. I would have accepted a synth, but again, no go. The voice fades out and the guitar takes over, weaving a very effective and at times almost deafening soundscape which swirls and eddies and draws you in, like a planet in the grip of a Black Hole. I check and we’re halfway through the track: that was quick.
Oddly, the closer is called “Outro”. Not that that’s a strange name for a final track, especially as the album opened with “Intro”. But I know of few if any outros that are over fifteen minutes long! This seems to continue the basic theme and idea expressed in the last track, with what sounds like an organ or synth booming out the main phrase, the guitar looping in and out of the musicscape -- I just can’t believe this is all done on guitar, though no doubt Ninetales will confirm or disprove that for me --- and so far no vocal, leading me to wonder if we are in for a quarter-hour instrumental? Well we’re three minutes in now, but after all that’s less than twenty percent of the way through the track. Plenty of time for it to change.
I must say, once you get over the jarring vocal and the album gets going, the music on it is quite stunningly beautiful. It certainly deserves, for once, the prefix of “atmospheric”, though whether I’d call it Black Metal or not is a question I would have to explore another time. This particular piece could grace any documentary about space or under the sea; it has that real flowing, ethereal, otherworldly aspect to it, almost like celestial music (which given its possible connections to Black Metal is quite ironic). Sort of reminds me in ways of Carbon Based Lifeforms and some of the more esoteric work of a certain Greek composer.
We’re now halfway through and I think it may be safe to say that there will be no vocals. I can’t see where any would fit in, but then, this duo do seem to come up with surprises and curve balls all over the place. I find myself wondering if Vader is a drum machine, not a human at all? No, he’s real all right; just saw a picture of him on his drumkit. Pretty amazing stuff this, although I must admit I don’t see where percussion comes in here at all. It’s completely ambient, atmospheric and almost abstract expressionism in music. And now we’re ten minutes in, and again the one basic musical phrase has been running through this gargantuan composition, yet somehow it doesn’t seem to matter, as you kind of find yourself floating away, drifting on the melody, being carried along towards the end of the piece, and the end of the album.
TRACKLISTING
1. Intro
2. Die kalte Teufelsfaust
3. Drudenfuß
4. Auszug aller tödlich seinen Krafte
5. Geist ist Teufel
6. Outro
When this album started I anticipated a real ordeal: the screeching, scratchy vocals, the scary effects, the seemingly-one-phrase guitar. I was ready to turn down the volume and just pay passing attention to it. But as it went on I found I was really getting into it, and now that it’s over I wish there was more. I still have no idea if all of that amazing music was indeed made only on a guitar, but if so I’m doubly impressed. Either way, this is some of the best instrumental and ambient music I’ve heard in a long time. Whether I’d class it as Metal of any sort, never mind Black Metal, is debatable, but whatever it is, I like it.
Ninetales expected me to possibly trash this album, and said he usually let people hear it just to gauge their reactions. Well, completely against my own expectations, this one has come up trumps and I am seriously glad I listened to it.
One of the best so far.