Odcházení

Music is a messy, abstract, lumpy artform. Deeply personal yet highly social, collaborative yet forever contested. From the very germinal of an idea, through to the creative process, the technical quibbles at the mixing desk, the audience and critical reception, through to endless reappraisal following the initial buzz. It’s little wonder so many of us dedicate so much mental energy to bottling its essence in non-musical idioms, little realising that 90% of our efforts are largely fruitless, streams of conscience little understood by those around us.

With all that in mind, it’s perhaps refreshing to come across a release as neat as ‘Odcházení’, the debut from this Czech outfit. Four lengthy but compact tracts of fast, melodic black metal, totally uncluttered yet packed with information, no wasted space, no clumsy transitions, and all contained within an agreeable half hours’ worth of music.

These pieces unfold in fluid interchanges of increasing complexity and simplicity, gliding from one passage to the next with a familiarity as pleasing as old leather. Scant timbral adornments such as acoustic guitar passages break up this framework in places, but for the most part the character and structure of Bran’s riffing style is enough to carry this handful of pieces for their considerable duration.

Despite the obvious Nordic lineage of this album, it easily outdoes much contemporary black metal for placing well trodden tropes in new situations. The ingredients are much the same, but the outcome could not be more striking for its quality. It’s akin to giving the same set of random ingredients to a master chef and, well…me, and asking us to create a serviceable meal from them. The studied artisan does not necessarily need to reinvent the wheel or go full avant-garde to create a striking product with enduring resonance.

The key to Bran’s success in this regard is simply their ability to unfold these compositions as one would a narrative arc, with each moment building on and complementing the last. The pieces flow with an intuitive sense of forward motion. For instance, lead guitar melodies, key changes, shifts in tempo, timbral variance, all too often these garden variety tactics are deployed by artists not to manipulate the music toward their artistic vison, but for the sake of mere content, because the blunt reality is you have to make your music do something.

But in the hands of Bran, each axiomatic technique of musical development is deployed at exactly the right moment, with efficacious emphasis, and for just the right amount of measures to achieve the maximum possible impact. Although Bran trade in a rather typical variety of energetic, fast paced, melodic black metal, their take on this genre is so mechanistically precise as to be almost categorically distinct from comparable releases from recent years.

Originally published at Hate Meditations