In the pantheon of “ways to reveal oneself as ill-qualified to tell strangers how to feel about the latest Hexvessel album,” telling you that I last checked in on the band at the time of their debut, Dawnbearer (a full twelve years and five albums ago), has got to be pretty near the top. One of the great joys of music, though, is its mystery, the way that its overall effect is irreducible to an inventory of its components.
As a result, I feel basically okay about arriving at Polar Veil alongside David Byrne in the Talking Heads’s classic “Once in a Lifetime”: “And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’”
Polar Veil, while not a particularly heavy album when stacked up against, say, Egregious Ganglionic Disgorgement’s Toppling Ass-First on the Business End of a Forklift, is notably heavier than the dark, neo-folk/psych rock for which I had previously known Hexvessel. Mat McNerney’s (aka Kvohst’s) guitars are a ghostly wash, an echo of black metal that has been stretched, thinned, clarified. Each of these eight songs is patient and deliberate, with a focus on Kvohst’s tremulous, archly dramatic vocals. Ville Hakonen’s bass moves with a stately bounce, prodding and coaxing the airier aspects of the band’s sound to stay rooted.
Even though the album’s sound is more forthrightly metallic than previous Hexvessel material, the project’s dark folk origins shine through nonetheless. Look, for example, at the melodic vocal line of “Crepuscular Creatures,” which feels like it was coaxed out of a deep forest. Sometimes Polar Veil strikes a similar note of rustic mysticism as Nordvis artists like Grift or Stilla, but in other places there’s a kinship to the towering psychedelia of Harvestman’s Lashing the Rye. The opening track concludes with an eerie, chiming chorus (“The tundra is awake / While the world is sleeping”), and a slow, sparse guitar arpeggio reminiscent of how Menace Ruine uses black metal brushstrokes to paint different landscapes.
Much of the album moves forward with a patient, mid-paced lilt, but always with a bit of tension. Album closer “Homeward Polar Spirit,” for example, rattles into frame like something straight out of Under a Funeral Moon, but then pulls way back. “Listen to the River” quavers and looms like Ved Buens Ende, but in the back half, Chelsea Wolfe collaborator Ben Chisholm provides guest keys and strings that give the song an even eerier haze, like Darkthrone’s recent Moog-fancying taken to a fervent yet precious extreme. One of the things I like most about the album is that for all its sophistication and poise, there’s almost always a hint of menace just underneath or partly out of frame. Sometimes it’s upfront, like on the particularly heavy thumping that Jukka Rämänen’s drums introduce on the stirring side B opener, “Eternal Meadow.” But elsewhere, things hang in the middle distance, like with the droning folk-doom riff backed by wordless chanting that opens “Older than the Gods.”
Although the album plainly revolves around Kvohst’s excellent vocals, they never fully crowd the spotlight, and a huge aspect of the album’s depth comes from Kimmo Helén’s keys and strings, which are sometimes introduced so subtly that you don’t realize they’ve come in until after they’ve saturated the film. But of course, Kvohst’s vocals don’t mind seizing the listener’s attention, like on the tremendous climax of “Eternal Meadow,” where his voice soars high above the musical fray in a way similar to Alan Averill in Primordial. The mixture of lightly avant-garde, droning, black metal-redolent wooziness that characterizes Polar Veil will surely appeal to fans of Ulver, Wardruna, Urfaust, and plenty of other curious wanderers.
The problem with a lot of music, like a lot of philosophy, is that it tries to be too clever for its own good. Polar Veil is steeped in a naturalism that evokes the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, and yet – mercifully – the songs bend and sway with movement that feels innate rather than calculated. The phrase “physician, heal thyself” (popularly attributed to Jesus telling a proverb in the book of Luke) means, basically, “figure out your own goddamn shit.”
Friend, I still don’t know what transpired between the already excellent Dawnbearer and the magnetic, resonant Polar Veil, but it seems Hexvessel made the proverb their own: Musician, steel thyself. The main riff on “Ring” is a languid, classically trilling doom riff, but with the way the song is backed by black metal tremoloing, it gives off a feeling of an avalanche viewed from a great distance; you can sense the building force, but from afar it seems to move slowly, mushroom-like, down the mountain. A blinding river of alluvial crystal. Music like this brings structure to sounds that did not exist; brings language to life; brings the soul out to the wilderness where it can burn, and burn, and then return.