Some bands wander by mistake. It’s hard to say if that’s the case for Norway’s itinerant Dødheimsgard (or DHG, if ya nasty), but because, over the course of their now five-album career, not one single album has sounded like another, a new Dødheimsgard album is always an event. With their latest offering, A Umbra Omega, that event is an event horizon, collapsing every sight and sound within reach into a phantasmagoric density of unstoppable brilliance. To appreciate fully this album’s triumph, however, it might be useful to review how DHG got here.
With 1995’s Kronet Til Konge, the band sounded very much of a piece with black metal’s quickly ossifying second wave. The album is fast, fierce, and razor-thin, but its guitar lines are mottled with a comfortable sort of melancholy hue that placed it somewhere between Darkthrone‘s Transilvanian Hunger and Gorgoroth‘s Antichrist. (Notable bit of trivia: Darkthrone’s Fenriz played bass on Kronet, and while in terms of jobbing it’s not a match for Nocturno Culto’s stint with Satyricon on Nemesis Divina, his bass performance is both audible and rather excellent.)
Monumental Possession followed just a year later, and whether owing to the addition of Aura Noir‘s Apollyon or not, the album sees Dødheimsgard in a much more venomous spirit. Presaging the atavistic regression of Darkthrone, Monumental Possession mashes the second-wave chill against the blessed crudeness of Celtic Frost and early Bathory, and vocalist Aldrahn really coming into his own.
One imagines, then, that as black metal shattered in a thousand directions and started getting really weird around 1997/98, Dødheimsgard surveyed the scene and thought, “Oh, that’s cute, but how about THIS?” DHG mainstay Vicotnik switched from drums to guitar and brought his former Ved Buens Ende bandmate Czral into the fold. Although DHG’s new direction was previewed on 1998’s Satanic Art EP, there was hardly a precedent for the supreme mindwarp of the timeless classic, 666 International. Always the dark-horse candidate for the best of Moonfog’s influential black/industrial trilogy (666 International, Satyricon’s Rebel Extravaganza, and Thorns‘s self-titled), 666 International is a work of cunning strangeness that combines rave and big beat techno, targetless tremolo runs, industrial decay, Aldrahn’s confidently peculiar vocal performance, and, above all else, a sneering disregard for expectation. Though its clearest successor is probably Aborym‘s With No Human Intervention, 666 International has never quite been matched for its cinematic scope, like The Prodigy in a Sharks vs Jets rumble with Immortal and Abigor in a radioactive, neon-belching dystopian factory.
And then, things went dark in the DHG camp. When they reemerged in 2007 with Supervillain Outcast, it was with significant personnel changes. Aldrahn had left and was replaced by Kvohst, previously of the DHG-inspired black/industrial band Void. Supervillain is the most accessible DHG album, with many of the rough edges and odd protuberances of 666 International molded into rubbery aggression and animated by Kvohst’s more melodic touch. Although they hadn’t lost the strangeness of 666 International, they had somewhat tamed it.
And then, more silence. Kvohst left the band, but continued singing with Code, Decrepit Spectre (who I am beginning to fret will never release a full album), Hexvessel, and now Beastmilk/Grave Pleasures. Aldrahn rejoined after exorcizing plenty of pure black metal demons atop the corrosive, unavoidably Thorns-ish guitarwork of The Deathtrip‘s long-delayed full-length, Deep Drone Master. And now, although there have been further personnal changes, the reunited duo of Aldrahn and Vicotnik makes it feel a little bit like the old gang is back together.
A Umbra Omega finds DHG at their most beguiling, kaleidoscopic, confounding, and enthralling. Aldrahn’s vocal performance is utterly commanding, brimming with a charismatic confidence that should put a thousand generic howlers to shame. Over the course of these five very long tracks, Dødheimsgard flits in and out of what feels like pure stream-of-consciousness, grafting the weirdness of the late ’90s onto deep, spacious frames. The balance between warm, soothing ambient passages and nervous, brittle, entropic black metal is such that the album sounds like a spiritual cousin to Anathema covering The Axis of Perdition, or Fantomas and Zombi crashing a Deathlike Silence reunion, or some other such unlikely synthesis.
If the album is a stream of consciousness, then it’s the stream of a consciousness that is constantly unraveling and attempting to rebuild itself. Several songs explode from the start with classically acrobatic black metal tremolo lines and blasting drums, but that fury is always short-lived, burning itself out into eerie openness, recursive breakdowns, atypical instrumentation (saxophone, synth, trumpet), false endings and fake starts. And yet, throughout the album’s hour-plus run-time, one rarely feels manipulated: these vast stylistic turns never quite feel like jokes played simply to startle. The strangeness of this album – which runs marrow-deep – feels like an honest, internally radiating strangeness.
In the first five minutes of the album alone, DHG spin a dizzying multitude of stories, from a brief intro that sounds like tuning some infernal radio to a minute of wild, fret-hopping tremolo spazz-outs, and from a bass-led, Virus-like seasick lilt to a break for Arcturus-style piano and saxophone. “God Protocol Axiom” again opens with dive-bombing tremolo, but then sinks into a chugging groove that makes way for Aldrahn’s bizarre pronouncements: “The devil hides / In fractal patterns / Beyond the singularity.” And about four minutes into “The Unlocking,” the band shifts into a piano-led carousel tune, with Aldrahn sounding eerily like Current 93‘s David Tibet. For each of these moods and sections, just as soon as they start to make sense, they’re replaced. But again, these shifts – frequent and abrupt though they are – don’t feel like the rug’s being pulled out from under the listener. Instead, it feels like the band is guiding you on a twilit chase after moments, like trying to remember a dream that slips away the harder you try to remember.
Because of their frequently overlapping personnel, Dødheimsgard has always been an integral part of the tight familial branch of weird Scandinavian black metal, and A Umbra Omega has every right to be spoken of in the same breath as such landmark experimental albums as Ved Buens Ende’s Written in Waters, Ulver‘s Themes from William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Arcturus’s La Masquerade Infernale, Solefald‘s Linear Scaffold, and In the Woods‘s HEart of the Ages. And just as with the very best of that late ’90s class, DHG lunge headlong at black metal just as much as they feint out of its way. In that sense, Dødheimsgard on A Umbra Omega is to black metal like late-period John Coltrane is to grindcore: that is, completely unlike in form, but deadly faithful in spirit.
How history will judge A Umbra Omega remains to be written, of course, but here’s an early take: Kronet Til Konge will remain the DHG album that sad men on the internet claim is the only good thing they ever did; Monumental Possession will remain the DHG album best suited for shotgunning broken bottles and prank-calling the pope; 666 International will remain the band’s most ground-breaking and influential album; Supervillain Outcast will remain the band’s smoothest, most inviting album; and A Umbra Omega will remain the band’s best album, full stop.
If you can tune yourself to these fucked frequencies, you’ll never stop chasing that feeling: not quite the ghost of a thought, but the ghost of a memory of a thought.
