Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult

by Dayal Patterson

  While drugs remain a key part in Vincent’s musical and spiritual journey, he is keen to point out that today he remains very much the pilot in his chemical journeys. “Without any doubt Blacklodge’s music is ‘under the influence’ of drugs. But it is certainly not enslaved by drugs, rather it is revealed. Drugs don’t write the music, but just clean my mind. With time I realized I didn’t want to play punk/junk music influenced by wasted states, but I want to play the magic revealed through this Luciferian chemistry and open the gates that they opened to me.”

  While Login:SataN bore promise and set the foundations for the group, it was also the product of a chaotic recording period interrupted by personal problems. It therefore proved a mixed and sometimes unfocused effort, with certain numbers such as “The Empress” sounding particularly rough around the edges. Though the guitars were notably chuggier and the song structures less straightforward, the nature of the opus led to inevitable comparisons—and largely unfavorable ones—with Mysticum.

  Login: SataN, 2003. The band’s explicitly pro-drug position is evident from the cover art.

  “It may sound surprising, but it’s not that much of a main influence. I mean, the mixing of drugs, electronics, and black metal doesn’t come from them, even if they were the very first to do this. When I heard Mysticum the first time, I thought, ‘Fuck, that’s great,’ but I have to say, the connection with drugs appeared naturally because of the people we were hanging out with, not because we were listening to Mysticum, and, as they said, drugs were/are used by many other black metal artists, but only they spoke openly about it. And for the music, I’ve been more influenced by Traumatic Voyage, a German band [through whom] I discovered all the possibilities and depth of mixing psychedelic visions, black metal, and being totally free from scenes and so to achieve the purest music vibrating with your own souls.

  “At the very beginning, extremely few people accepted our music and our artistic direction,” he continues. “That was even more absurd: Mysticum was highly praised and worshipped, and at the same time people considered our musical direction to be totally nonsensical, and that it was highly irritating to speak about drugs. At this time I learned that fans and listeners can be very stupid, and that often it is more important to appear ‘true’ and ‘dedicated’ than to really have a balanced opinion. But I didn’t care, the most important thing was to make my own thing, and not try to please people or so-called ‘true black metallers.’ Now, years after, it seems things are moving a bit and more and more bands are mixing electronics and black metal, which is a great thing. So we still feel like pioneers.”

  That claim would be substantiated by the mind-blowing follow-up album SolarKult, released in 2006, an opus that saw the band perfect the vision touched upon in the debut. Where InnerCells and Login:SataN are often chaotic, oddly produced and in places even seemingly out-of-time, SolarKult is breathtakingly precise, focused, and methodical, its pounding beats, sound effects, live drums, and processed guitars twisting effortlessly around intricate compositions. On top of these sit the emotional and unhinged vocal performance, the most notably human element present in the machine-like odes. The result is a work that bridged the gap between the colder, more calculated sounds that came from the Moonfog label around the turn of the millennium and the possessed fury of bands like Mysticum. SolarKult also marked a conceptual evolution, moving away from the hedonism of the first album with notably more thoughtful lyrics that delved into more esoteric philosophical concerns.

  Saint Vincent circa 2003.

  Photo: Matthieu Canaguier.

  “But at the same time, it’s the same,” counters Vincent. “Philosophically alchemical, like lead turning into gold, hard drugs turning into revelations, it’s the same thing. The process of the band is clearly alchemical—alchemy links infernal matter, metals, and earthly things, with spiritual and higher conceptions and meaning. We do the same, pointing at the demonic forces. Religiously speaking I’m more alone, on my side, in my corner, watching and trying to understand the insane process that we are going through. I’m celebrating the downfall of humanity through technological apocalypse, because it’s the greatest of all art being accomplished.”

  Vincent’s heavily conceptual journey would continue in 2010 with T/ME, an opus released simultaneously with Time Is the Sulphur in the Veins of the Saint… by Austrian black metallers Abigor, the two albums made available separately on CD and released together on vinyl. Both were based around conceptions of time in relation to Satanism, though Blacklodge also explored wider subject matter, drawing upon the fascinating religious visions of nineteenth-century doctor and theosophist Anna Kingsford while painting from a wide musical and lyrical palette that directly referenced compositions by artists such Celtic Frost, Bach, and Nick Cave. The result was an album that saw the band relinquishing the precise and angular approach of SolarKult to explore a more despairing and psychedelic direction.

  “It’s surprising,” Vincent ponders. “If time is the concept it should have been more ordered, more angular. But no, because this album, as downfall, is putting forward the human reaction to facing the angular pressure of time, which results in anguish, despair, and panic, which makes the music and the sound paradoxically more chaotic. The album is kind of a deception from previous illumination. SolarKult had the power of a clear vision, strength and clarity, and this one is falling into the chaos of doubt, despair, and uncertainty. SolarKult is like taking acid, but revelatory, a prophetic trip and T/ME is the bad trip flashback. The first album/level [was] the chamber of darkness, then in the extreme depths of darkness, the void, the Light of Truth appears—this is the SolarKult, the Chamber of Illumination. The next step is incarnation, for infinity falls into matter and limits, ruled by time.”

  Two years later the band would return with MachinatioN, an album that revisited the more ordered assault found on SolarKult, Vincent explaining that this was largely due to Blacklodge and Abigor agreeing to experiment more on their joint release, hence T/ME’s sidestep in direction. As intense and unrelenting as the band’s second album, MachinatioN boasts similarly in-depth thematic content “This one is the Chamber of Control. This unveils the infernal process Satan put in shape to enslave humanity and establish the last ultimate empire on Earth ruled by him. A machination fueled by his trident, the three prongs of Satan: Medusa, the void of destruction and dissolution, swallowing souls and crumbling the deeds of men. Caesar, the claws of oppression compressing and ordering the men into systems that have more importance than the man’s life itself. And the prong of Lucifer, revealing forbidden knowledge to daring wills, infusing the fire of rebellious visions to humanity. Those three prongs are three sides of modern Satanism, preparing the ultimate reign of the beast on Earth. Each song is related to one of the prongs.”

  Clearly going several thousand steps beyond the recycled hedonist and science fiction musings of so many industrially tinged metal bands, the thematic and lyrical content behind Blacklodge remains engaging and unique, perfectly complementing the musical vision and Vincent’s own spiritual and philosophical explorations, which point to a pretty apocalyptic conclusion.

  “[The way I see it] technology is neutral,” he concludes. “I think there’s more an evil root in the spiritual world incarnating down here through technology and fighting against the human core. Satan is the agent of incarnation, the guide from ideological, symbolical sphere into vile, corrupted, limited flesh. But technology itself is like an axe; you can cut a tree or kill people, it’s not [inherently] evil. For me the solar kult is the religious/technological end, as for me the goal of humans is to master God’s power, and that is symbolized by the sun, as the eye of Lucifer, shining with splendor as a calculated revenge unto God. So, the goal of all humans is to master nuclear power as the most powerful technological trophy and this race to power can just end in a global nuclear conflict. It sounds kinda old-fashioned and ‘cold war’ to say that, but I still believe as a real event to come. This is the solar kult, the wor
ship of God’s power, the ultimate fire, as worshipped by the Incas, and now all nations.”

  49

  LIFELOVER

  POST-BLACK METAL PART I

  GIVEN THE MYRIAD STYLES black metal explored in the nineties, it was perhaps inevitable that the bands that followed would go one step further and take core elements as their foundation while nonetheless moving into entirely new genres. If the years that preceded had seen acts going as far as they could from the core black metal sound while holding firmly onto the Satanic/occult/misanthropic ethos, now bands would rethink even that, taking elements of black metal’s form but rebuilding them in an entirely new emotional, ideological, or spiritual direction. In a sense, it is less a change of form than of context. An early example is Solefald’s Neonism as a contrast to Arcturus’ La Masquerade Infernale; while both strayed from conventional black metal music considerably, it was Solefald who made a more obvious leap in terms of theme and aesthetic.

  By the mid-2000s this phenomenon was surfacing with increasing regularity, Sweden’s Lifelover being one such fascinating act. Spewed into existence in 2005, their conflicted relationship with the black metal scene located them comfortably within the “post-black metal” label. Like Solefald and Shining they bore a heavy urban overtone, and where other post-black bands such as Amesoeurs, Alcest, and Fen have tended to lean toward the romantic, pastoral, and uplifting, despite an inherent sense of melancholy, Lifelover’s approach was as cynical as their name, their outlook unrelentingly bleak, urban, and fragmented. With elements of pop, shoegaze, depressive rock, and new wave, their sound was in many respects gloriously contradictory, but the black metal elements that swam within this strange brew are far less surprising when one considers the musical heritage of the band’s founders.

  Begun as a duo, the band was originally comprised of “B” (born Jonas Bergqvist, and otherwise known as Natdall of orthodox black metal bands Ondskapt, Dimhymn, and IXXI) and the even more awkwardly named “( )”, also known as Kim Carlsson of depressive black metal acts Hypothermia, Kyla, and Life is Pain. Speaking in 2010 to B—who sadly passed away the following year—it quickly became apparent that Lifelover’s inception was just as chaotic as their music, born out of desperation and destructive actions.

  “Lifelover was formed one morning in June 2005,” he explained. “Me and ( ) had been awake for a pretty long time, drinking, and cutting ourselves, and the whole house we were in was full of vomit and blood. ( ) had laid some additional vocals for my black metal band Dimhymn for the recording of [second album] Djävulens Tid Är Kommen. For some reason the day after the ‘blood massacre’—the first time we had ever met—we decided to sit down and play some guitar together and just improvise with a lot of delay on it. We thought it sounded cool, demented, and urban, so we recorded the demo Promo 2005 right there. Regarding the band’s name, I had once been called a ‘Lifelover’ back in 2004 in an e-mail by a fucker that did not even know me, and he sent the same e-mail to a lot of people and labels. So we both thought it could be a fun thing to call the recording Lifelover.”

  Pulver, 2006.

  “When me and B met for the first time, we took a ride into the countryside to record some music,” recalled ( ) of the group’s inception in a phone interview I conducted for Metal Hammer in 2011. “The first thing that happened was that we cut ourselves up. Then we took a walk in the woods until we were empty—you can probably imagine, the combination of blood loss and drinking alcohol, it makes you get into a bit of a different atmosphere. We began to make music and started turning the house we were in into something resembling a slaughterhouse, the walls being entirely covered in blood, each piece of furniture, each instrument, everything. In the end there was more blood than anything else and we were in a haze, but we simply felt we had to do something, so we started to play guitar together and that’s when we recorded the first two songs that became Lifelover.”

  Sprawling and improvised, the band’s promo would not prove reflective of the direction the band were ultimately to take, and it was not until the following year that the duo began to write new songs, in doing so forging the unique sound they are known for now. Expanding to a six-piece, the group now saw B handling guitar, vocals, speech, and piano, ( ) responsible for lead vocals, H. (“Henrik”) on rhythm guitar, Fix (“Felix”) on bass, and 1853 (Johan Gabrielson) and LR (Rickard Öström) also contributing vocals. Together the group worked to create their debut full-length, released in 2006 as Pulver, Swedish for “powder.” With material written largely on an individual basis, the songwriting was dominated by B, with ( ), LR, and 1853 also contributing.

  “The new sound really started when me and ( ) recorded the [Pulver] songs ‘Nackskott’ and ‘Stockholm’ together,” B explained. “We both felt a big satisfaction with these songs, and when I continued to write I followed that direction but also found new directions at the same time, so the process of writing Pulver was very exciting indeed, and a new way of writing music for me. We recorded the songs over a period of two months and as you may hear, we did not lay much effort in making it a perfect record regarding the production. It was recorded during alcohol and drug abuse… ( ) recorded the vocals lying on the floor bleeding. It was two strange/sick months.”

  Strange and sick indeed: constructed in an often jarring cut-and-paste manner vaguely similar to that of Japan’s Sigh, Pulver’s songs hinged on idiosyncratic juxtaposition, with strangely high energy passages and almost ska-like rhythms sitting alongside bleak and torturous sections, the programmed drums complimented by an array of often baffling samples. The resulting combination proved as striking and unusual as the photographs of the blood-soaked nude adorning the sleeve artwork, combining the founding member’s black metal background with a clear influence from the likes of Joy Division and even The Cure.

  “Dynamics is everything in music,” considered ( ). “For us it’s very easy to write something slow, cold, and bleak, but we want a challenge when we write music, and it’s more interesting to write something different. I have no idea if it sounds happy, or strange, or crazy, or fucked up to people listening—just as long as the end result of the album is good, I’m satisfied. [The] samples we mostly pick from Swedish TV shows and old movies, things that we watched growing up. I don’t really remember how the idea came up, but we did find that it made everything sound more demented and sick. We never reveal exactly what each sample comes from, we want people to wonder and try to find out for themselves, and to reveal such details destroys some of the mystic feeling they create.

  “Regarding [influences] there are many bands that have given me that spark,” he continued, “but it’s really hard to name some of them, I don’t know which to choose since I always have listened to so much different genres. I would not call us black metal, but of course both me and ( ) come from a black metal background, so it’s not strange that we have elements of black metal in our sound.”

  Making the most of a highly productive inter-band chemistry, Lifelover quickly followed up Pulver with a superb album entitled Erotik, released in 2007. Despite still sounding like it could all fall apart at any moment, Erotik was nonetheless a notably more rounded and complete album, retaining the fragmented, pulsing sound but striking home with more emotive, even harrowing, compositions. Once again songs were largely written separately, with ( ) no longer actively involved and additional vocalist LR apparently filling this void.

  “With Erotik we in some way wanted to reflect the life and urban environments of Stockholm,” B explains. “We definitely wanted to do something different from Pulver, but still have some of that element left. We wanted it to have a ‘narcotic’ feel to it as well, and release all the madness inside of us. The sound became much darker in many ways.”

  Thematically the album proved almost painfully honest, giving an insight into the heart of the beast with an abundance of bleak urban booklet imagery and English-language songs—often with clean-sung vocals—painting a picture of depression and substance abuse. Wit
h the Swedish song titles translating to “A Man in the Worst Days of His Life,” “The Road of Death,” “Welcome to Powder City,” and “Autumn Depressions,” to name a few, it was certainly no walk in the park for either the listener or the creative forces within the band.

  Lifelover’s brief deviation from the drum machine led to addition of Non into the ranks, the drummer appearing on 2009’s Dekadens EP.

  “It’s quite simple; the lyrics reflect our lives and our lives consist mostly of a great amount of agony and angst,” admits B. “And to reduce our angst we take those drugs necessary. And that’s mostly it, but we have also touched subjects like love—or broken/lost love to be exact—hatred for mankind and suicidal thoughts. We also write about urban surroundings and miserable city life. It’s not exactly positive lyrics but they probably are more honest than most bands out there. Lifelover totally reflects me as a person; when you have heard all of the music we have done and read all the lyrics, you know a bit of me, in one sense you can get to know me in that way. I think it’s the same with the other guys as well to some extent.”

  In that sense Lifelover reflected an almost schizophrenic character, with upbeat, seemingly joyous passages sitting alongside moments of abject misery. It is these “happy” parts that feel most out of place within a black metal context but unlike, for example, Alcest, even the most cheerful of passages tend to drip with a hyperactive and manic, Prozac-fueled atmosphere.