Aijna

Arvet's first album demonstrates a real turnaround after the earlier EP "Ihmiskarsimys": the music has a full and energetic sound and flows much better due in no small way to A's drumming. Main man Noxifer is able to concentrate on what he's best at doing which is playing guitar andwriting music. There is a full-time vocalist now and his voice plus Noxifer as fellow vocal duellist help to define Arvet's style even more. Having a live drummer also makes a huge difference as the songs are no longer in thrall to an inflexible mechanical beat and can change speed and mood as the musicians please. This means Noxifer and the others have the freedom to compose and play music as they prefer, and there is greater scope for improvisation on the fly.

The music is often super-fast and scrabbly and gives the impression that if it slowed down at any time, the whole cranked-up beast would fall apart immediately. The texture of Arvet's sound is raw and scrapey and the clear clean production emphasises every jagged, distorted tone. A definite cold, empty and dark atmosphere exists in most songs and anguished howls appearing to come from distant hells can be heard. The musicians demonstrate a high level of technical proficiency in each and every song while they rocket along: melodies, riffs and rhythms change swiftly and precisely and few songs allow time for listeners to absorb everything they're hearing.

The first few times when you listen to the album, the songs pass by in a blur and you might be hard pressed to distinguish among individual songs that keep adding new riffs and melodies throughout right up until the end. Each song does actually have its distinct riffs and that these rarely repeat during its whole course. As the lyrics in all songs are in Finnish, those listeners who know the language will get far more out of the album than the rest of us but we non-Finns can still enjoy the singing and treat it as an extra layer that embellishes the music: the vocals convey quite a lot of emotion ranging from anger and hostility to despair and pain.

The fact that each song conforms to a general template of continuous change means that no one song really stands out above the rest in technical virtuosity. On an emotional level though, one of the middle tracks "Hirtetyn Mestarin Temppeli" makes an impression for a fairly lengthy passage of pained howling over steady mid-paced tremolo guitar strumming. Later songs tend to be a bit slower than earlier ones, "Liekehtivä Dharana" being one such example where the music travels at cruising crunch speed with very few moments (if any) of blast-beat spitfire and ending in an unexpected extended droning-guitar feedback passage that might have come straight out of the Deathspell Omega guitar-experimentation manual.

Overall this is a robust and consistent work with a lot of energy, of which there's more in the first half of the recording and near the end, and not so much in tracks 5 to 7. Perhaps a couple of the longer tracks could have been edited for length to give the album more punch and the musicians do go a bit overboard on the blast-beat explosions in the first half of the album. There is no denying though that these guys mean business and intense business at that.

It’s been four years since Arvet put out its first tape demo Elävän Kuoleman Aamuna, followed by the EP Ihmiskärsimys a year later, both releases prominently dwelling in melancholy, not unlike a plethora of other Finnish black metal acts of late times that lean toward depressive black metal without the pitifulness usually attached to the sub-genre. These bands, instead, shine with occult ideologies and on Aijna, Arvet’s first full-length, the band moves further away from evident depression, introducing a lot of dissonant melody and overall filthiness to the music. The result is something utterly possessed, yet still so beautiful.

Looking at Aijna’s roster, a grand change is visible: Noxifer is no longer the only one responsible for the instruments, as he’s joined by a full line-up of members with strong Saturnian Mist relations. A four headed assembly doesn’t, however, result in precise and professional playing, not at all; Arvet sounds filthier than ever, not only because the instruments are executed with intuitive touch (instead of sitting in the studio recording the fifteenth take of each song), but also production-wise the band still feasts on dusty, low-fidelity soundscapes.

Musically, Aijna took me by surprise right in the beginning when ”Kuoleman Äiti” crawls maliciously with seemingly almost indecipherable dissonance, until a Si Monumentum esque lead melody escorts the track with distant, haunting screams somewhere in the background. Soon after the ’proper’ black metal hits, all the fury reminding me of Verge’s Hatemagic to a great extent - not only this song, but the whole album in general. A clearer example could be ”Rukous Mestarillisen Ajatuksen Oivaltamiseksi” that fluctuates between rapid blasts and slower beats, and closer to the end the melodies rise to heart-rending beauty. In fact, this pattern seems to apply to many of the songs: starting with more rapidity, the tracks progress into quite epic melodies in the end. During first listens, these compositions say little, but after a month of regular listening, I realize they’re all done pretty damn well, including the long outro of ”Liekehtivä Dharana” in which a simple, ritualistic discordance is being repeated for multiple minutes.

If the music alone feels hard to digest, the lyrics are even a level higher. While I was pretty much able to decipher the themes of e.g. mortification on Ihmiskärsimys, Aijna goes wider and deeper into occult subjects in a way that only an advanced explorer of esoteric beliefs can comprehend. The lyrics are spewed out with true feeling by both Zetekh and Noxifer, and the actual content is an important, if not even mandatory, part of Aijna. Personally there’s a lot of unlocked doors in the maze of Aijna for me, and it’ll still take quite a long while to work out everything. But as the thing with comprehensive albums always goes, it isn't required to understand everything and that is what brings a nice charm to a record.

With its intriguing song progressions, authentic and raw sound, intricate occult imagery and symbolic lyrics blazing with ardor, I dare to say that Aijna deserves its place among other modern Finnish classics-to-come, or cult legends, such as IC Rex’s Valonkantajan Alkemia even if I’m already quite certain that - all unnecessary elitism aside - only few can see Aijna’s appeal due to its ultimately challenging nature both musically and thematically.

4.5 / 5
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