Mylingar – Út Review

[Cover art by Beyond Art]

There are bad musical moods, and then there’s Mylingar. Over the course of the last decade this group of anonymous Swedes has concocted the type of ill-meaning black/death that makes Diocletian seem like a Care Bear soundtrack. Third album Út is punishing, thoroughly antagonistic, and completely unwelcoming. It also kinda rules.

On paper, there is nothing particularly unique about Mylingar’s sound, but there’s something here that goes beyond. They play caustic, dissonant, heavily-blasted black/death metal that focuses as much on the polluted atmosphere as on things like identifiable riffs and motifs. Think Portal if they decided to play war metal, or perhaps Deathspell Omega gone death metal, or an artsy version of Blasphemy (as if). There’s nary a major chord in sight, and much of the album hammers and cuts at you with a unified cacophony that is quite frankly a little exhausting. But that’s where the vocals come in handy. Yes, the voice here is as venomous and evil as everything else, but it’s also extremely charismatic, bellowing and spitting and phlegm-ing all over the place but in a way that ought to elicit a nasty grin or two.

It helps immensely that Mylingar really knows how to pen a tune, and that, in spite of everything here being absolutely designed to annihilate everything in its path, Út still, well, rocks. The riffs and rhythms frequently churn, but it all churns as if the butter has gone rancid, been poisoned, and then been shat in by the town goblin. The drums blast, sometimes at hyperspeed levels, while providing plenty of ride cymbal flair and little details (the drumming really carry things). The guitars, indistinguishable as they sometimes are, push things into nightmare mode by refusing to provide any moments that are remotely comfortable, while the eased-off, open-picked moments sound positively nauseated, as if the sounds themselves are meant to make you sick. Such passages help to give Út the slightest sense of dynamics, but just the slightest.

That’s not to say things are never catchy, however, as Mylingar sneaks in some moments from the instruments that join the vocals to make Út, the tiniest, teensiest bit infectious. For example, “Blóð” features a fun, syncopated rhythm at one point that would probably get you dancing if everything around it wasn’t so polluted and bleak. “Af,” meanwhile, gets downright riffy in the this-can-be-air-guitared way, but quickly swaps out such moments for those noxious open-picked parts. Basically, Mylingar isn’t going to hit you over the head with hooks, but they’re still going to hook you.

The album also saves some of its strongest stuff for the end, with 11-minute closer “Neðan” perhaps the best track of the bunch. The song actually, almost shockingly begins in non-dissonant mode, but it doesn’t last long. Soon enough the song is doing its unholy churn, but with the sense that there’s some extra big, important, epic going on with these proceedings, as if it’s all a heightened version of everything that came before. Even the open-picked passages feel extra sickly and drunken, and “Neðan” reaches its bottom when it really slows the tempo in favor of ultimate nastiness. After that, all it can do is gradually build back to a fever pitch for the climax, in which the vocals absolutely lose their minds and the listener is left with nothing but a few minutes of unsettling sounds in which to reflect. Even here, at the very end, the band refuses to provide a real resolution.

Mylingar makes music for a very specific corner of mankind. Not only do you need to have a taste for this particular side of black/death metal, you also might need to have a taste for pain. Love Hollow Knight: Silksong but wish the soundtrack was all nasty war metal? Go for Mylingar. Have a habit of trying to match Sean Evans wing-for-wing as he quizzes celebrities on their favorite Blasphemophagher albums? Hit up Mylingar. Still, even with these tendencies, prepare for a little bit of a shock factor. Út will straight mess you up.