Cairn

It has taken me two and a half years, and a very inconsistent writing schedule, but we’ve finally reached 100 reviews. From albums I’ve loved to ones I detest, from the mainstream to obscurities, I’d like to think I’ve covered plenty of ground, though never as much as I’d have liked. Writing for the Archives has been a hobby of mine that I am honestly quite grateful I picked up, for a variety of reasons. For one, it has motivated me to discover and bring attention to more underground music, and it has also helped improve my writing somewhat (seriously, if you think my recent reviews are bad do yourselves a favour and don’t read my first 30). I didn’t start this without much thought outside of “Yeah I’ll write about my top 10 from 2019 and that’ll be it”. Seeing as I’m reaching an important milestone here though, I think it’s only fair that I finally cover the album that started it all to begin with.

I found Mizmor’s Cairn by complete accident while I was perusing r/Metal on Reddit, being a neophyte in the underground and all it was the first year I got invested in constantly searching for new music. I still very vividly remember listening to it back in 2019. At the time, I hadn’t heard anything quite like it, and truthfully, I still haven’t. I wasn’t much of a repeat listener back then, I was a “one and done” type of guy, hopping from one release to the next in a futile attempt to quench my desire to indulge in more and more music. But something was different this time. Cairn was stuck in my head, I couldn’t help but think about its oppressive doom, the searing black metal riffs and A.L.N.’s howls for months after I had first listened to it. Then 2020 came about, a year I’m pretty sure no one looks back upon particularly fondly, and in that isolation I thought to myself “I’ve nothing better to do, might as well start writing about last year’s top 10”. It was originally going to be a very short 10 review run where I’d just write, all with the express purpose of getting good enough to write about the topic of this review. Didn’t take me long to realise I had a long way to go before I felt like I’d do Cairn any justice. After a multitude of detours, I managed to cover that infamous top 10, and I finally felt somewhat prepared to take the plunge.

Informed by Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus”, Cairn is a journey of self-discovery. It details A.L.N.’s experiences after his crisis of faith, and how he was left with no higher purpose or being at the mercy of a cruel and uncaring universe, yet finding that the only thing that can push one forward in this absurd world is pure spite towards it. Admittedly, I can’t say I shared A.L.N.’s experiences 1:1, but having at the time barely gotten out into the world as a young adult, and seeing the state of the world around me, I couldn’t help but feel an inexplicable dread in regards to my being, my raison d'être and my place in this world. And it’s those feelings that this release captured in such a perfect way.

The album in and of itself is full of peaks and valleys, both sonically and thematically. It perfectly encapsulates the overwhelmingly crushing weight of an inherently meaningless existence, as well as the moment one becomes aware of it through its massive sound. Cairn is a monolith, meant to suffocate its listener by way of its relentless atmosphere and songwriting. The tracks are slow, long-winded behemoths, none being below the 10 minute mark, and the way they ebb and flow makes this arduous journey all the more intense. All of them are imbued with a strong doom influence, things more often than not slowing down to a complete crawl, each massive chord on tracks like “Cairn to God” and “The Narrowing Way” reverberating through a desolate, yet full, soundscape. It didn’t take long for A.L.N. to capture a sound that felt massive and open, yet at the same time so intimate. Cairn’s decidedly mid-fi sound is a perfect fit for what it tries to express, its buzzing, yet at the same time hulking guitars can both crush and sear the listener, depending on what the situation calls for, all while the bass’ pulsing adds a muscular, yet paradoxically gentle at times layer. The album as a whole is propped by this production, which turns it into something that is seemingly larger than life, encapsulating just how tiny man is in the grander scheme of things.

What I found most fascinating about this project though was its use of melody, sparse as it might be. At no point does A.L.N. launch into Gothenburg-styled soloing, nor does he play anything particularly elaborate, but the way he applies melody in subtle, yet impactful ways at the right points in the music is a game changer. Moments like the solemn lead in the first half of “Desert of Absurdity”, the melancholic acoustics that open and close the same track, as well as the mournful riff that appears after the 12 minute mark of “Cairn to God”. Their subdued nature helps enhance the strangely hopeful, but at the same time melancholic nature of the music, a proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. It’s things like these that for me manage to dispel the notion that melody has no reason to exist in extreme metal, and prove that delicate use of it takes far more mastery than writing a saccharine solo that ends up being a flurry of notes that ultimately say nothing. To put it simply, Cairn is a showcase of the old adage of “less is more”.

That being said, we’re not only faced with pure doom, seeing as there are more than a handful of pure black metal segments. While at their core they’re rather traditional tremolo riffs that just rip through your speakers, the way they unfold is nothing short of ear-catching. An explosion of anger and revolt towards the universe, they’re uplifting despite their hostile nature, soaring over the rest of the instrumentation and propelling the narrative forward, both lyrically and musically. The way “Cairn to Suicide” bursts forth without any warning makes for one of the most intense and powerful segments of the entire album, a testament to man’s resolution to see life to its logical conclusion without resignation. It might not be my personal highlight here, but it’s undoubtedly Cairn’s defining moment.

I would be remiss not to bring up the man himself, and his vocal performance. A.L.N. is to put it bluntly, intense. The way his raspy screams and howls echo over the music reeks of desperation, and it’s felt every time his voice comes forth to spew forth his diatribes on absurdism. Even when he goes down to his lower registry, it’s not for long, nor is it any less forlorn. But the most powerful tool at his disposal, outside of the compositions themselves, is that scream of his. His so-called “hawk scream” was absolutely chilling the first time I heard it, and it’s no less effective now, almost 3 years after my first listen. It’s filled to the brim with so much raw emotion that I feel like using any adjective to put it into words wouldn’t do it justice. It’s this vocal performance that motivated me to read into the lyrics to begin with, and by extension do research on them, leading to me wanting to read “The Myth of Sisyphus”, a work I promised myself I’d finish before I’d come anywhere near this review. I wanted to read it not only for the sake of well, reading, but also in an attempt to get a more intimate knowledge and perspective on this work of art. Who’d have thought I’d end up getting into reading by way of music?

Honestly, this review might’ve ended up being pure word vomit of me just laying my thoughts and experiences in text rather than talking about the music itself, but I don’t care. Cairn is more than just music to me, it’s an album that outright changed my life. I can’t really bring myself to give it a concrete value of “favourite album of all time”, or anything of the sort, because the effect that it has had on me as a person isn’t something I can assign a numerical number to. It transcends any metric or scale and simply exists in its own little realm all by itself. Nothing will ever touch it there. It’s an album that inspired me. It inspired me to start writing these shitty reviews, to read more literature than I used to, to get into playing music, and all these are things that I don’t think I’d have ever gone through the trouble of doing had it not been for it. It’s a monument to man’s resilience and desire to strive to exist and create art. Albert Camus himself might’ve said music is far too strict and mathematical to capture the essence of absurdism, but that’s because he never got to listen to Mizmor, which is his loss really.

I might just be a few years into my 20s, but Cairn has had such a profound and stirring effect on me that I feel compelled to bookend this review with a simple “thank you” to A.L.N.. Sure, the odds of him actually reading this are astronomically low, but no matter how much I write about this album I’ll never be able to adequately put into words the things it makes me feel without this becoming a seemingly endless crawl of text that would ultimately still feel not enough. This is my longest review to date, beating out my terrible Metallica review from 2020 by a sizable margin, but honestly, if there’s any piece of music that deserved having this much written about it, it’s this one.