[Cover art by Mister Curse]
Stack Overflow In Corpse Pile Interface. Stack Overflow in…Corpse Pile Interface?
“What’s in a name? That which we call a corpse pile, by any other word would smell as putrid” – billy shakes
Forgive my bastardization of that quote, the silly misnomer, the callous abandonment of MLA formatting, but A Forest of Stars have led my mind down a path both dark and curious. I’ve spent the better part of a month trying to distill this record’s idiosyncrasies into a quick n’ quippy 900-word snack and you know what? I’m still not quite there, and because I am a person for whom spite is continual nourishment, I’d like to open with a rough draft that for an embarrassingly long time was the front-runner for final formatting.
A Forest of Stars – Stack Overflow In Corpse Pile Interface (An Exhaustively Researched and Edited Review by I. Hams
- Pure / Depraved
- Delight / Disgust
- Rigid / Slack
- Playful / Stern
- Verbose / Succinct
~fin~
With Stack Overflow In Corpse Pile Interface, you are getting a new A Forest of Stars album. It CAN be simplified to that degree. You lose a few pixels at distance but the bird’s-eye view is enough to grasp the overall topography. In fact, when revisiting The Corpse of Rebirth, it’s remarkable how consistent the group has been in illustrating their own peculiarities. I imagine a bespoke 2007 boardroom, whiteboard festooned with bird bones and other elegant / grotesque talismans, crammed to the outer rim with tiny letters written in great haste and with too much downward pressure. In the center, circled and roughly italicized, a set of rules by which to proceed. The gentlemen (and lady) around the long table smoke and nod appreciatively toward the fruit of their labor – the bylaws of A Forest of Stars council-decided and ratified. “This is unusual?”, you ask. “A band generally adhering to their own established sound throughout an almost 20-year career? Pish posh with your silly corporate analogy. That’s what bands do!” Yet, who does A Forest of Stars but A Forest of Stars? Who can sustain for six full-length albums a sound and structure so seemingly unsustainable at length? In THIS economy?!
“Ay, there’s the FUCKING rub” – Will S.
(An aside of full disclosure – I’ve always felt intimidated by my colleagues preternatural ability to shotgun their own reviews with FFOs and apt comparisons to existing works, both within metal and apart. I tried hard to compete with this one, but there’s only so many times I can think about David Lynch in a single day.)
Press copy for Stack Overflow describes the album as “British Black Metal”. Glean from that what you personally may – I, for one, take away “a fourth of a fifth of” not much. What does it mean for music to be “British” outside of its location of origin? Perhaps someone more anglophilic than I can give a right proper answer to that query. The quieter moments of A Forest of Stars’ music certainly evoke a pastoral quality: simple, open harmony with uncomplicated melody. Never do they stray into Akercocke-ian levels of brutal, though they do share a penchant for histrionics. Neither do they delve into the more folky/atmo vein ala a Wodensthrone or Fen. What remains?
A Forest of Stars as a black metal band also does not compute, though sufficient evidence exists to bolster that claim. Historically their album art has leaned into the dark and mysterious. They dress like Ren Faire aficionados. To date, they have roughly seven hours of recorded material, a significant chunk of which contains blast beats, tremolo-picked leads, raspy vocals. The troupe weave arcane tales, musically and lyrically, but upon cross-examination there is something else at play within their work, an out-of-body experience where the spirit of black metal is looking up at its earthly shell, gnashing its teeth at its decaying carcass.
Let’s pose a hypothetical. It is an alternate timeline and my ears have yet to be corrupted by A Forest of Stars in any capacity. You tap me on the shoulder and hand me an iPod (stay with me please it’s just a hypothetical) upon which is one file, “A Prophet for a Pound of Flesh” from A Shadowplay For Yesterdays. You goad me to sit in the nearest Victorian era-looking chair (we have to drive around a bit), and press play. Ten minutes later, upon the track’s conclusion, you ask me, “Now, sir, tell me about that black metal tune what you just heard, would ya?” My forehead would wrinkle, and you better believe that fucker sharpei wrinkles. “Black metal? You reductive, silly person. That was A Forest of Stars.”
“There is nothing either good or bad, but reviewing makes it so” – Billiam of Shake’s Pier
Stack Overflow In Corpse Pile Interface eschews the compositional maximalism exhibited by A Shadowplay For Yesterdays. It’s downright reserved compared to Grave Mounds and Grave Mistakes. It is, in ferocity, the mid-life lull to The Corpse of Rebirth‘s youthful bile. It is also their magnum opus.
“Ascension of the Clowns” lilts in on e-bowed guitar before the violin of Katheryne, Queen of the Ghosts’ violin establishes the opening theme. The rest of the ensemble enters soon and we are slowly waltzing, the stately theme floating elegantly over the band, patient and threatening like a snake preparing to uncoil. “I AM MY OWN MAGGOT CONSUMING MYSELF,” introduces the familiar mania of Mister Curse. This is the AFoS we know and love – the dichotomy of the uninhibited soapbox madman’s ravings underpinned by an accompaniment, as far as it may be presented within the intensity spectrum of black metal anyway, of a relatively staid group of musicians. Stack Overflow, however, more than any of their previous albums, widens that distance by a considerable degree. If we consider “vocals”‘ and “the rest of the instrumentation” as distinct elements that do NOT combine into the hegemonic whole that is “the music”, and further, if we consider these distinct elements as a dial, numbered 1-11, controlling a level of stability (in terms of the conventionally harmonic, the amount of frenzy in the delivery, etc), I picture the dials as shown below, except instead of boring words they are very cool knobs with numbers and LEDs:
VOCALS – 9 / THE REST OF THE INSTRUMENTATION – 4? 3?
All that horseshit is to say this – now, more than ever before, do these two facets of A Forest of Stars utilize each other to maximize the band’s impact. The true strength of the output can be assessed in both direction – the halves’ tremendous ability to repel each other is equal to their ability to cleanly snap together. I didn’t understand that until I could step back and see both interactions. Admittedly, for the first number of listens to Stack Overflow I could not get past the rivalry. There are entire portions of songs, verses if you will, that Mister Curse chews the scenery into smaller and smaller pieces until you can’t remember what the backdrop looked like. Conversely, there are moments of sublime melodiousness where the band is laying back on a groove, locked into a melancholy chord progression, and you dread the moment Mister Curse returns. This is the game, though. You can’t have one without the other, and before long you itch for the yin to swallow the yang and the yang to regurgitate the yin.
“Roots Circle Usurpers” is an actualization of this concept. The first two minutes showcase the ability of our string players to awe with the understated. Delicate and deliberate violin melodies sing over a driving, folky clean guitar. Mr. Titus Lungbutter’s bass stays supportive but active, adding in some pleasing counterpoint. At 3:10, the curtain burns away and Mister Curse, though still smouldering, reins it in just a touch rhythmically, so that he and the band can finally dance together, if only for a few minutes. The track builds and builds to an enrapturing climax around 6:30, but like all earthly climaxes it is short-lived. Katheryne, Queen of Ghosts, enters, leading another waltz, her tone cool and calm. These two sections, in particular, are perfect examples of the type of maneuver A Forest of Stars can pull off album after album after album – the long and powerful full-band enchantment where the chord progression hits just in such a way where you never want it to end, and the stage-clearing aria, portentious and beautiful, a respite from what you’ve gone through and yet also a harbinger of future peril. And indeed, future peril arrives. Mister Curse rejoins the fray, howling and gnashing, as the track barrels forward to its rapturous end. The layering of the weeping, descending violin line over the crumbling blast beats and the guitars’ lovesick tremolo gives me goosebumps. To quote a salient lyric from a previous track – “WOW.”
Famous American actor of screen and primary lyrical muse of Stack Overflow In Corpse Pile Interface, Owen Wilson
“You speak an infinite deal of nothing” – William Shakespeare
He’s right, you know? Sometimes it’s difficult to convey the magnitude of one’s appreciation without flitting off into loving, unfortunately tangential directions. A track by track breakdown of Stack Overflow In Corpse Pile Interface would give you the black and white play by play, sure, but does not that approach lose the “why” of it all? Guitars riff, drums pound, vocals howl, songs end and others begin. We’d get just as far reading copy descriptions of “Musical Black Metal”. The “why” is the “what” made human, and A Forest of Stars create deeply human music, despite their every effort to shock and disgust. They tap into suppressed and/or hidden feelings through the sheer force of the totality of the presentation. Final track, “Not Drinking Water”, epitomizes my point.
They don’t bring out every weapon in their arsenal to close the album. Mister Curse, for example, is so comparatively sedate as to possibly have been medicated (not out of the question considering his output over the previous 5 tracks). The song is composed extremely similarly to the other tracks on the album – long form, patient, ebbing and flowing from violent peaks to solemn valleys, a description that can apply equally to a majority of songs in their catalog. Did you forget the whiteboard? I digress. In fact, compared to some of the wilder moments of the album this far, “Not Drinking Water” is for the most part serene, pedestrian. Then, you arrive at the 37th second of the 8th minute.
I refuse to over-describe the last portion of the song, but suffice it to say it is so bludgeoning, so complete in its A Forest of Starsitude that if the band called it quits tomorrow, I couldn’t think of a more fitting conclusion. I’m giddy for you to get there and to absorb / be absorbed.
All these words and we didn’t even sniff the lyrics! Good luck with those. My American education learnt me some square dancing but this ain’t Kansas anymore. Endless, dithering descriptions of mood and we didn’t even discuss the immaculate production work! Interminable attempts to scrutinize the inscrutable and we didn’t unpack Stack Overflow In Corpse Pile Interface?! By god, that was my opener! Could someone crank “God Save The King”, please?
A Forest of Stars – Stack Overflow In Corpse Pile Interface (A Heavily Condensed and Lovingly Blunt Review by I. Hams
Indifference / Fascination
Repulsion / Connection
The End / The End
A Forest of Stars – 2026
