Enslaved's RIITIIR and the personal nature of black metal

I saw Enslaved a few weeks ago, the same show where I saw Royal Thunder, and it was a great show. The band played most of RIITIIR, which is their latest album, and the only album of theirs I was really familiar with. (I had originally planned to go see Royal Thunder and Pallbearer, with Enslaved being an afterthought, a band I wasn't at all familiar with). The first time I tried to listen to RIITIIR (and I mean it when I say "tried") I think turned it off after about halfway through the second song. It came off as bizarre and obnoxious. But that may have been back in October, before I had my black metal epiphany. So when I went back to listen to RIITIIR after buying my ticket, I was surprised to see how much I liked it. It wasn't bizarre and obnoxious, it was progressive and ambitious. "Thoughts Like Hammers" starts off like any normal song would, until the dueling vocals show up, mixing clean singing with black metal growls while still maintaining melody and atmosphere. And the rest of the album followed suit.

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Immortal and Mayhem were among the first two black metal bands I ever listened to. It was actually for a class on rock history and not through my own exploring, and I really did not like the vocals. Harsh, ugly shouts that came nowhere close to what vocals should sound like. Yeah, they're meant to sound demonic and inhuman. They exemplify the chaotic nature of black metal. But anything more than two minutes of that was too much, and so those bands sat on the back burner once that section of the rock history class had passed. Now, it seems like it's impossible to go more than a day without putting on something that screeches and claws both yours ears and something deeper. I think it's that primal, instinctive reaction to shrieks and growls that drives them. Those sounds aren't made naturally or willfully. Whether the growls are more aligned with anger, or aligned with despair, the underlying connection is human suffering.

Human suffering is a common topic in music, though it isn't always raw in the way that black metal is. The non metal approach utilizes clean vocals with lyrics that hold the weight, where stories are recounted that touch upon relatable circumstances, settings, and characters. Songs have more specific meanings, which isn't to say there's no room for reinterpretation, but that emphasis on lyrics is, for me, the dividing line as to my preferences. With harsh vocals and growls, and with the emphasis of vocals over actual lyrics, there is more room for me to reinterpret and redefine song on a personal level. For example, as much as I love Springsteen's Thunder Road and the angst-ridden theme of escape, I don't have a car I can jump into, and can't trade in wings for wheels, go pick up Mary, or drive as far away as I can from anywhere while it's dusk outside. And even though that's a story with relatable feelings, they all stem from something specific in Springsteen's words. You can't ignore him when he talks about cars.

I think The Passenger by Iggy Pop is the number one played song on my computer, but I couldn't tell you all the lyrics. I've been listening to Bruce Springsteen since forever, and I still stumble over the second verse to Thunder Road. I grew up ignoring the printed lyrics that accompanied CDs, mostly because I knew enough to know that the situations Springsteen would be singing about would be over my head when I'm 10. "Wrap your limbs around these velvet rims and strap your hands across my engines" from Born to Run didn't hit me the first few thousand times I heard it. Now it changes the complexion of the song from that mystery meaning my naive youthfulness assigned it to something much more straightforward. Contrast that with Det Som En Gang Var by Burzum, Anarchic (Side A) by Skagos, or In the Constellation of the Black Widow by Anaal Nathrakh. The latter is a blackened grindcore band that intentionally don't publish their lyrics, and it's impossible to make out what they're saying. Which is perfect if you're someone who doesn't check the lyrics of songs. And while the other two songs have known lyrics, they don't matter. No one pays much attention to lyrics in metal. (Case in point: Korpiklaani). Sure, the choruses to songs by Amon Amarth, Wintersun, and Blind Guardian are understandable and fun to sing along with, but there's the inherent recognition that the words are just a placeholder for something more introspective and self-defined.

Those first two songs do have lyrics you can look up (note: one of them's in Norwegian). Det Som En Gang Var is the opening track to Burzum's Hvit lysett tar oss album, which is my personal favorite among Burzum's discography. It's hard to even really call the vocals "singing" because they are basically screams devoid of melody and indecipherable. But not indecipherable enough to hear the emotion coming from within those screams. "Emotion" coming through in black metal may seem contrary to its definition (cold, frozen, dark, bleak) but there's undoubtedly raw, visceral negative emotions that immerse themselves into the backbone of the music. And it's more subjective than a Springsteen song. Take Skagos' Anarchic (Side A): a sweeping, sprawling 23-minute masterpiece of 3rd wave/Cascadian black metal. There are elements of shoegaze and dream pop at points, creating an atmosphere akin to a cold, foggy morning somewhere quiet and solitary. The vocals sound of something in despair, a bitter sense of regret and loss. That's just what I think when I listen to it, but I like that these songs have more room for me to assign my own meaning. Hooray for existentialism in black metal!

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There's a weird place I go to when I put on a metal album. It's where the music becomes more than what it is, more than simply the combination of instrumentation from a bunch of people. The collective final product goes far beyond human capacity for creating such a soundscape. It's ethereal and mysterious, and laves me wondering where such a sound could come from. Those inhuman shrieks are a part of that. Think about the only time a person would make those noises. None of them is pleasant. The idea that someone could willingly pour that out of them is hard for me to wrap my head around. Those voices have to come from some dark place. It's as if these musicians are actors, putting on a mask and slipping into characters who have encountered such pain and suffering that they cry out in this primordial fashion. I don't know many of the musicians I listen to. I may recognize a few names and faces, but I at most I could tell you where they're from, and that's it, because it would be distracting. The music isn't about them, it's about those characters you hear perform. I'm nervous about ever going to see Agalloch live, because I'm afraid it could reveal that facade.

I was wondering what would happen when Enslaved took the stage, because I was afraid I'd only be able to experience them as a couple of guys playing instruments and not the characters from their albums. That nightmare didn't happen. They tapped into whatever source musicians tap into when they go from regular person to genius artist, and those five guys on stage are now a cohesive unit, almost a superorganism. A unique feature of Enslaved is how they mix both traditional black metal vocals and clean vocals into their songs, sometimes creating harmonies and duets that subvert everything I've been talking about. Which is cool in a Jekyll/Hyde kind of way. By blending these two forms together, there's a more direct acknowledgment of their inherent differences, and that they can coexist. Enslaved also happens to utilize three different vocalists, meaning these voices spread out, instead of coming from the same source (bands with clean vocals and death growls tend have one vocalist do both parts). Maybe this is looking too much into it, but I like this multi-vocalist concept because it drives home the schizophrenia of clean/harsh contrasts (I always imagine bands with both harsh and clean vocals to be examining the narrator's internal struggles through this musical device).

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Enslaved killed it, by the way. Just in case you were still waiting on a review of their performance after reading all that.