Through Fire, Everything Is Renewed

A more fitting title may have been ‘Through Mechanisation, Everything is Re-evaluated’, so fittingly does Atramentum’s second LP slide into the modernist black metal turn of crisp, industrial production, dissonant artificiality, and dense sonic landscapes stuffed with complex musical information via angular tempo changes, rubato drum fills, and enveloping guitar tones. Whether this amounts to a genuine evolution of past forms or is simply a re-imagining of black metal fit for a seemingly inescapable contemporary cynicism only time will tell. For every apparent victory lurching the music forward with conventional harmonics, there are three defeats back into harsh dissonance, jarring pitch shifts, and doom laden tritones.

Atramentum certainly fit neatly into this fledging subgenre, evolved in part by Icelandic acts such as Svartidauði or Carp Noctem, and traced through the undulating cell replication metal of Mitochondrion, and the windswept battering rams of Ireland’s Malthusian. If “Through Fire, Everything is Renewed” is par for this dissonant/industrialist course then, why single it out?

In taking a very pagan perspective seriously, – i.e. the emphasis on destructive forces such as fire as a necessary pre-requisite for renewal – they imbue the music with conflict, and therefore an undertone of hope. This is no mechanical drive totally hostile to organic life, an annihilation liturgy we have seen play out countless times in modern black metal. Atramentum pay lip service to these qualities certainly, but ultimately the real soul of this album can be found in those moments that pivot on traditional harmonic and melodic material. The clash between this and the more alien tonal choices keeps one engaged.

Equally the drums deploy the all too human stylings of jazz, adding dynamics, expression, opinions, over and above the complex artificial aesthetic that colours the rhythmic framing devices. Vocals veer from standard black metal histrionics to grounded hardcore emotivism to the guttural humanist deformities of death metal.

But far from this being a simple case of contrast manipulation – between the synthetic and the organic, between the nihilistic and the hopeful – Atramentum seek to escape the absurdly cyclical structure this style of black metal often adopts. There is a teleology to these pieces, a clear forward motion and purpose, rooted into the album’s concept of destruction and renewal. This marks it out as a work beyond the pure (and oftentimes browbeating) totalitarian nihilism of modern dissonant black metal, and takes us back into a world where music can offer both a diagnosis and a cure for society’s ills. Moreover, because these flashes of daylight are sandwiched within excessive and overbearing abrasion, they feel all the more earned, and all the more stable as a result.

Originally published at Hate Meditations