Free Solo is the story of a death and doom-defying mountaineer. It scared the shit out of me in an instinctual way, like the thick cloak of night might in an unfamiliar forest. Ascending the uncompromising face of a mountain with no life-saving equipment beyond one’s freakish facility for the task? Dreadful, no thank you, Mom. Yet, since primitive man (no, not them) rested their gaze upon majestic peaks of magenta, they have assailed, they have conquered and they have died to reach every summit. Alex Honold’s life’s work is just that, the assailing and the conquering parts, anyway. For glory or in grievous error, mankind’s dogged commitment to the erasure of frontier persists today as it has since time immemorial.
Eiger is a tale of doomed mountaineers. There was, there is, no happy ending, no uplifting takeaway, no post-credit scene teasing a sequel. Thankfully no one is picking up a black metal album in search of a Hallmark platitude.
Aara, in addition to stealing the crown of “First Band Alphabetically” – take that Aardhvarkh! – play a brand of atmospheric black metal markedly more windswept and imposing than your typical atmoblack outfit. The broad strokes are the same: somber chord-led songs interspersed with haunting leads and contrasting sequences of cutting and calm. If your average black metal band is outwardly explosive, your average atmoblack band is implosive, contained, like the soundtrack to a snow globe. Aara breaks from the pack in crackling intensity. I would argue Eiger occupies the tidy middle in the Venn diagram of, let’s say, Paysage d’Hiver and Saor: cold and haunting enough to ensorcel the Swiss, melodic and well-produced enough to satiate the Scots.
The instrumental work is violent and bestial. “J” tears apart his kit with reckless abandon, flooring every other section with an underlayment of seismic double kick (a quick and neurotic aside: the promo copy lists Aara as a duo, however J has played with the group since their second album. Always a drumsmaid, never a drum, I guess?). Berg tremolos vehemently – fussy, delicate picking this is not (a quicker, neurotic-er aside: pseudonym a little on the nose for this one, eh?). The guitar tracks crush with the intensity of a 1936 Swiss avalanche. What, too specific? Vocalist Fluss scrapes through the upper canyons in a single range but it is quite effective. His higher screech acts as the frigid wind across the peaks as well as the human element of the story, the tragic figure being actively swallowed by his surroundings.
If you listen to the above track and enjoy it even in the slightest, please hop your moribund booty over to their Bandcamp page and drop some doleful dollars. If you enjoy that you’ll enjoy the entire album, truly. I would normally take a moment to analyze my favorite track or two in this here spiel but in the case of Eiger I believe the value lies in taking in the work as a whole. Thematically everything here works in tragic harmony. Sonically the listener is transported to the Mordwand itself, a sheer face of cold, relentless death. Certain moments pierce through: the intricate ride cymbal work sprinkled in, the moments of ACTUAL dynamic playing in the acoustic guitars (see 4:22 in “Senkrechte Welten”), the wind-whipped sliding of the riffs in “Todesbiwak”. These are the sweet piping of musical icing atop the cake, though; the sponge is still the key to making everything work.
The more I listen to Eiger the more I appreciate it as a singular tribute to a terrible moment in time. Aara are storytellers, just as able to painterly illustrate the terrible wrath of nature and man’s subsequent demise as they are capable of slicing your ears in half with razor’s edge fury. Wholeheartedly recommended to fans of atmospheric black metal, prospective mountain-climbers and anyone whose inner monologue happens to be voiced by Werner Herzog.
