For a genre as steeped in the rich, pungent peat of occult historicism as black metal, Lychgate is nearly a perfect band name. A lychgate is a small gate topped with a pointed wooden roof at the entrance to a churchyard. Its historical significance was not so much as an entrance to the church, however, but as the place where the church priest would meet the corpse at the start of the burial rite. The medieval English landscape was, in fact, etched and scribbled with a latticework of footpaths called ‘corpse roads,’ which connected parishes to the cemeteries in which their dead had the right to be buried. (Rights which were due as much – if not more – to the church’s interest in tax revenue and political control as to geography and tradition.)
The dead have their architecture, their transportation, their infrastructure.
But onward, to more pressing matters. Lychgate’s self-titled debut album writes a syllabus from the combined history of the band’s four members which ought to, sound unheard, make Lychgate a no-brainer connoisseur’s choice. Despite having emerged seemingly fully-formed, Lychgate isn’t entirely a new band: It started in 2001 as a solo project of Vortigern (who handles guitars, organ, and keyboards on the album) under the name Archaicus. After a demo apiece in 2003 and 2004, the project apparently fell dormant, but reactivated in 2012 by adding Greg Chandler of Esoteric on guitars and vocals, Tom Vallely of Omega Centauri on drums, and Aran, mastermind of the much-missed Lunar Aurora, on bass. Such an embarrassingly rich roster is certainly enough to warrant a name change to mark the occasion.
Lychgate’s music is black metal in both form and effect, but it moves with just enough of a wobbly tilt that it suggests orthodoxy refashioned from muscle memory after a long sleep. That is, it blasts and crunches and howls and tremolos – as one does – but in a way that somehow feels exploratory and reflective, like the fingers of a hand needling into some dark, recessed cave and groping on a familiar form that the mind can’t yet place. Chandler’s vocals, as always, are forceful and dripping with arcane feeling, and yet every bit as suitable to Lychgate’s swooning, sideways black-and-sometimes-doom attack as to Esoteric’s world-birthing psychedelic funeral doom. While Lychgate occasionally weaves in medieval symphonic patterns that call to mind a more restrained version of early Emperor or Abigor (see “Against the Paradoxical Guild, for example), the band also delves into atmospheric excursions and minimally avant-garde rhythmic digressions without losing the thread consistent, terminal darkness. (See, for example, the tumbling, off-time opening of “Dust of a Gun Barrel.”)
Vortigern’s keyboards and organs are a crucial ingredient, though used with respectable restraint. They add a massive, liturgical density to Lychgate’s sound, which typically walks deliberately down a long passageway, occasionally throwing open a door and exploring a doomier side compartment. I called Lychgate a “connoisseur’s choice,” and although the term sounds fairly, well, dickish, I think there’s something important to it: Lychgate makes the kind of black metal that newer devotees of the genre may overlook as insufficiently aggressive or inventive. That’s only because the band has wisely avoided needless flash in favor of deep, affecting melodicism and an understated… Hell, I hate to say ‘playfulness,’ but that’s what it seems like. As though, within the grim and harrowing confines of this chosen musical form, the band is collectively pushing out the walls, stretching the seams, finding a hidden slipstream or unexplored recursive loop of sound and exulting in it, however briefly. For those listeners more attuned to adjustments in miniature and incremental novelties, Lychgate will slowly become a revelation: understood only for a moment and then lost, leaving behind a memory you can’t name but won’t forget; a dim shape glimpsed through the heat shimmer of a baked plain or below the deep rippled surface of a quiet inlet.
The dead are like that, too; on their roads, through their gates, in their murmuring sleep.
