MACBERK GOES POSTAL: BACK IN BLACK

This week, that trendy post-black metal business gets a shot in the arm from our Lee….

So last week, I flippantly made a remark about the possibility of Watain fans becoming bona fide, dashing hipsters. Y’know, ditching the bullet-belts for a stylish, chequered flannel shirt and so forth. I thought it was quite a reasonable prediction of trends – I still do – however some people didn’t agree. I returned home to my inbox stuffed with rather threatening emails suggesting that “Satan will eat your scrote-sack off because you listen to faggot, cry-baby shit” and “Watain wank in animal blood, that’s true evil music”, and simply “…………….Satan”. So, on the contrary to being intimidated, I got my thinking cap on and thought that this week I will black it up (in musical terms, not comically racial terms) and talk a little about the melding between post-rock and black metal that’s been budding lately.

It comes as no surprise that the term post-black metal was eventually coined in the shelf rags by over-zealous pigeon holers such as my good self. Think about it for an exploratory minute. The torturous desolation conveyed in sonic minimalism by acts such as Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Neurosis (yes, I will mention those names a lot!) isn’t too dissimilar from the icy misery instilled in acts such as Burzum. So finally prefixing the word “post” never seemed more applicable than it did to black metal. Post-cartoon Satanism, post-Norwegian black metal, post-walking around forests looking like a miserable fuckin’ panda.

Go to a Wolves In The Throne Room gig. You’ll get black metal aesthetics, black metal aggression – albeit refined – and a transcendental black metal atmosphere, but, hell, the hipsters just love it! You’ll see more groomed beards and black rimmed glasses than at any other average black metal showcase.  And others are emerging in the name of progression too; Altar Of Plagues have their fantastic ‘White Tomb’ album that made a lot of black metal fans feel some of those climbing riffs you’d hear on Isis’ ‘Celestial’ album, Woe made a late entry last year with the sublime ‘Quietly, Undramatically’, bolting snarling black metal riffery onto barren clean passages that wouldn’t be blinked at on a Cult Of Luna record, while Cold Body Radiation released an unapologetic and superb definition of post-black metal in the ‘The Great White Emptiness’ devised from what could be effortlessly pinned down as Mogwai’s euphoric soundscapes and Wolves In The Throne Room’s vicious, blackened underbelly. Then you have Twilight; a super-group made up of a bunch of guys from Isis, Nachtmystium, Minsk, Leviathan and Krieg. If that’s not the formula for a hybridisation of post-rock and black metal, then I’m gayer than a musical biography depicting the rise of John Barrowman.

So, to conclude, there is more of a tangible marriage between the misanthropic attitude and violence of black metal and the melodic instrumental formula of post-rock than some would care to realise. Maybe black metal will stop being seen as music based on immature faux- blasphemy and maybe post-rock will stop being seen as something solely coveted by the likes of NME and Rock Sound and we can all live in musical catharsis. You may even start seeing people dressed like this soon……

…fear not – at least the music will be quality though, eh?

Lee