One of life’s great tragedies is the fact that you can never really, truly, completely know another person. We all live rich, stubborn, vertiginous inner lives, playing out a second-by-second drama etched on the interior of our otherwise public selves. Most of the time, we forget this fact. That’s probably necessary for carrying on our quotidian business without collapsing under a deftly-camouflaged existential loneliness. But every now and then, you’ll look in the face of a friend, or in the eyes of a lover, and you’ll realize: I have no idea what’s happening in there.
In a roundabout way, this sadness explains why this new, self-titled Satyricon album is so, so good. But also – and perhaps more strongly than usual – it’s so, so good to me; it may be total bullshit to you.
But first, a bit of back-tracking. Did you know it’s been five years since the last Satyricon album? I was frankly shocked to realize that’s how long ago The Age of Nero was released. For a band that put out its seven previous albums over the course of fourteen years, that’s quite the gap. But maybe the reason I didn’t register the band’s rather extended absence is because “Satyricon” had become an easy heuristic in my mind. Anytime the band’s name was mentioned, my inner ears could immediately produce a quick snapshot of the sort of maliciously streamlined black ‘n roll of the Volcano/Now, Diabolical/The Age of Nero trilogy.
Satyricon disrupts that heuristic, but the damnedest thing is, I’m not sure if it does it on purpose.
Because even though the basic template established on the band’s last few albums seems to continue with Satyricon, it quickly becomes clear that some of the threads are unraveling. The entire production is soft, rounded edges, with Frost’s double-bass rumble a gentle pitter-patter against the meticulously placed and utterly simplistic 4/4 rock beats he plays. The operative phrase that kept suggesting itself the first few times through this album was “blunted swagger.” The entire album is beautifully organic, but gives off an oddly detached, sorrowful feeling that calls to mind some of the acts in the Zeitgeister stable (Valborg and Woburn House in particular). Satyricon is sadder, softer, and stranger than any of the band’s recent output, but as a listener one can never quite tell if it was done intentionally, or if Satyr and Frost were honestly trying to make another steel-clad black ‘n roll album to fill arenas with menacing swagger and just… lost their way somewhere.
That probably sounds like I’m dogging the album, right? I’m not. Satyricon is a compelling, inventive, and curiously addictive album. But what really puts it over the top for me is that it feels like an album at odds with itself. It feels like a sad album trying to put on a brave face, but those weaknesses shine through in spite of its best attempts. I don’t mean musical or compositional weaknesses, though: I mean human failings, disappointments, and the slow, sad crush of time. This duality is particularly noticeable on “Nocturnal Flare,” where some of those clean, ringing guitar lines wouldn’t sound at all out of place on Earth’s Hex if you slowed ‘em down to half-speed. Even the lead-off single “Our World, It Rumbles Tonight” tosses up a pretty severe challenge. I suspect a lot of listeners will hear this song as an attempt to be Satyricon’s catchy “hit” in the way “Fuel for Hatred,” “K.I.N.G.,” and “Black Crow on a Tombstone” were for the preceding three albums. But coming after the curious instrumental intro track “Voice of Shadows” and “Tro og Kraft,” which eventually burns its way down to nothing but a chiming echo chamber, I’m not so sure. If “Our World, It Rumbles Tonight” feels sedated, it could just as easily be by design as from lack of inspiration. And, while we’re here, to ward off some potential criticism: that riff to “Tro og Kraft” is, admittedly, crazy simple, but you know what else? I guarantee that it will be lodged in your head just as soon as you’ve heard it, and that’s not easy to do these days, when our ears are battered by the millions of riffs already written.
But okay, okay, even if you’re on board with me so far, then comes “Phoenix.” It’s track number five, basically smack-dab in the middle of this fifty-ish minute album. And it’s, well… is it a ballad? No, not quite, but it features crooning lead vocals from guest singer Sivert Hoyem, former frontman of the hugely popular Norwegian rock band Madrugada. It’s a swaying anthem with a ridiculously catchy chorus, but, y’know, it also has tambourine in the background, and little twangy guitar slides. If you absolutely had to make a rough comparison to another high-profile metal release, I suppose you’d have to admit that it’s awfully reminiscent of the placement of “They Rode On” on Watain’s The Wild Hunt. Here’s the difference, though: “They Rode On” feels utterly calculated to be what it is – a catchy, clean-sung anthem that brings in otherwise leery listeners. “Phoenix” is almost discomfiting because of how accessible Satyricon has already become at this point (both in the album and in its career). It makes “Phoenix” feel less like checking off some obligatory box, and more like a song written by a band that could be either completely at ease with its identity, or profoundly wounded and searching for answers in new stylistic terrain. (Easy postscript to write: “Phoenix” is a better song than “They Rode On,” and Satyricon is a better album than The Wild Hunt.)
Satyricon occasionally feels like someone mislabeled the ‘A’ and ‘B’ sides, because for the most part, the stranger bits seem to pop up in the first half, and a song like “Walker Upon the Wind,” which probably hews closest to the rigid, martial sounds of the previous albums, leads off the second half. Even so, that song’s midsection still tunnels inward for some brief, windswept contemplation. And again, penultimate song “The Infinity of Time and Space” is a head-scratching beauty, cycling back and forth between a bunch of seemingly unrelated sections. That also sounds like a gussied-up insult, but it’s not intended as such; rather, I’m fascinated by the fact that I simply don’t know whether to take this album’s strangeness as the product of accidental flaws or intentional change. Few albums leave the listener in such a state of suspended, unresolved tension, and it’s a treat to bask in the muted, sorrowful anger (or vitriolic sadness, depending on how you hear it) and just… drink it in.
I’m not sure if I like the album for the reasons the band intended, or if I’m intentionally mishearing it to fit some previously constructed internal narrative, but either way, does it matter? If the inner self of your husband or wife or child or priest or brother or pet or teacher or… or of even your own self, really — if that’s all terrifyingly unknowable, then why bother with art? Why try to puzzle out what the artist’s intention might have been? This album, eventually, will just be out there in the world – alone and unmoored, like all of us. We all have to approach it with whatever’s in our head, and the artist must have reconciled herself to the fact that she doesn’t own it anymore, at least not in an interpretive sense. A piece of art is not somehow an intermediate interlocutor between creator and consumer. Whatever artist-self I build up from news scraps and image husks, and then assume was behind the creation of the art I’m enjoying? That’s a total fiction.
Satyricon is a rock that you found in a field. So here’s the final verdict: You might hate this. But for the first time in a long time, it feels like its creators don’t care. (But then again, maybe they do.) Here’s the only question, then (really, the only question ever): Do you?
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Great review. Or I just think that because I feel the same way.