One of the most rewarding pleasures of being an avid music fan is watching a new band grow. The vicarious thrill of accepting a new band into your own personal pantheon is usually all the more potent when you’ve been there for the ragged but scrappy demo; the first EP self-financed by pawned appliances and bucketfuls of donated plasma; and the debut full-length, bought with years of toil, underappreciation, blown-off shifts, and weekends crammed in the van for a three-state jaunt because, goddamnit, you have to want it. Some bands just seem to skip the growing pains, though. And when that happens, well… confidence is a hell of a drug.
Take Vattnet Viskar, for example. This young band from New Hampshire waltzed into my frame early last year with a three-song, self-titled 10” EP. Although it was very much indebted to the hypnotic, atmospheric black metal of Wolves in the Throne Room and Altar of Plagues, it nevertheless exhibited a compositional clarity and easy command of both melody and dynamics. From those very first few spins of the record, I spun out my own little imagined trajectory for the band: “This EP should get a smattering of underground buzz. They’ll tour it while writing material for a full-length and shopping for a label, and when the LP comes out in another year or two, it’ll probably be more of the same atmospheric, naturalistic black metal. It’ll sound really pretty and snarl like it needs to, but it won’t do much to overcome the clamor of the unconvinced that this is fashionable, fashion-conscious black metal cut too closely from the Pacific Northwest’s cloth.”
Vattnet Viskar’s debut full-length Sky Swallower, then, has two basic morals to teach: first, that I’m basically a dick; and second, that music is a goddamn art, not a syllogism, and if you let it go where it needs to, it will succor you.
But okay, here’s what all of those words are dancing around: Sky Swallower is an immaculate-sounding album, and one that sees Vattnet Viskar turning simultaneously sideways and inward in order to achieve an intriguing and novel fusion of atmospheric black metal and the gleaming, post-rock sludge grooves perfected by Isis over the latter course of that influential band’s career. Of course, that might make it seem that Vattnet Viskar has gone from simply echoing one established style to mining two equally well-wrought veins, doubling up on mimicry at the expense of innovation. That’s not how these songs scan to these ears, though, because Sky Swallower is so intently focused on the exposition of a single musical idea: bliss through repetition.
Sky Swallower is such a shimmering success because Vattnet Viskar has recognized the inherent similarity at the core of both black metal and atmospheric post-metal: the possibility for meditative transcendence through intense, purposeful repetition. (Yes, I used the ‘t’ word, and no, I will not comment further on’t.) Even more impressive is that the band has managed to compress all the widescreen build and burst required of this sort of music into a rigorously compact thirty-eight minute album.
The album opener “New Alchemy” wastes no time establishing the band’s black metal credentials. It’s hardly novel, but the melody is mournful, insistent, and propulsive. But then, at about 1:45, they switch; there’s a gap in the signal and the drums pound like a march instead of a storm. And then, by 3:00, the calm unrolls even more fully, with the sweetest, thickest, most sternly rubbery bass you can imagine outside of Isis’s Panopticon. But throughout this midsection, the drums basically play the lead role, as the guitars slowly pick out fragments of a chord. Across its entire spectrum, Sky Swallower is an absolutely gorgeous sounding album, with a full and perfectly balanced production that prods the listener’s sympathies carefully toward the stellar role of the bass and, in particular, the drums.
Seamus Menihane’s drum performance is one of the album’s real highlights. These songs – five ‘proper’ songs and three interludes – don’t typically engage in a lot of tricky meters, or call for lots of flash, but Menihane constantly switches up his fills and transitions fluidly from the Isis-stomp meters to the blasts and swift shuffle-swing of the black metal sections. His finesse is especially prominent on the tremendous “Breath of the Almighty,” where the rhythm section locks into a tight, mathy squall while the two guitars twin-tremolo furiously. It’s one of the songs that most closely fuses the two disparate styles, and the tension and eventual bringing-together of those styles is very impressive.
“Mythos” cuts in some flitting, almost post-punk rhythms amidst the otherwise heroic black metal clamor, and as a whole best exemplifies the trance-inducing power of Vattnet Viskar’s stylistic fusion, relying heavily on the drumming to enliven and punctuate the monolithic riffing. Sky Swallower is an album that feels internally coherent, but some of its individual moments still chime out with particular fervor. Like four minutes into “Fog of Apathy”? Shiiiiiiiiiit. It’s fast, heavy, and dense, but still emotive and tactilely engrossing. The song’s conclusion, too, is just so simple, but it’s also so manifestly rich and dripping with honest affect that it feels like swinging from the uvula of the universe, hat in hand, hair blown back and open to all possible newnesses.
Sky Swallower’s final song “Apex” concludes with an instrumental coda that winds things way down while teasing, by mere omission, at the unknown future. Sparse but insistent drum pats accompany some close-mic’d acoustic guitar strumming that doesn’t sound like much, but then again, listen closer. That sound is so physical that I can feel it twang on my finger-strings, and resonate in my soundboard-heart. Blur your vision enough and the guitar sounds like a harp. Close your eyes completely and then tell me where that sound is leading you.
You can’t; that’s the point.
