Заревом над прахом / Like a Blaze Above the Ashes

Back in that mid 1990s sweet spot – after the international explosion of black metal, but before liberal arts students had clocked its uniqueness – there is a wealth of solid albums for the traveller to discover. This is black metal that stayed true to the form first and foremost, but expanded on it in subtle yet important ways, and most importantly, remained faithful to the original ethos. It is creative and original in ways that do not immediately jump out at the listener, you have to pay attention for your rewards, and notice which elements of their predecessors they have expanded upon and developed. This is all just a fancy way for me to say that the hipsters will never find us here. Not least because the Forest are a bit far right for most people’s tastes. Their loss.

Russia’s Forest, fabled stalwarts of the Blazebirth Hall group of bands out East, had a good run of consistent LPs through the late 1990s. The second of which, 1997’s ‘Like a Blaze Above the Ashes’ is for my money the most interesting of these. The reason for this is that subtle blend of variety and conceptual unity. Structurally this is similar to that benchmark of maturity in black metal: Burzum’s ‘Hvis Lyset Tar Oss’. Four tracks of building moods and intensity, that all feed into one another resulting in one standalone piece of music throughout the album’s runtime.

We open with a tremolo riff that makes good use of major keys to convey triumphalism, aided by a very subtle choral accompaniments. The distorted vocals are in the mid-range for black metal, but they are kept distant and muddied with reverb, giving the music space to breath. Indeed, everything about the production points to creating the feeling of being outdoors, on a windswept hill, but this is achieved in more subtle ways than more wind samples. Drums almost never vary from a mid-paced blast beat, serving only to add a sense of urgency that hits the listener at the subconscious level. In minimal black metal such as this, their role in creating subtle urgency is understated yet important.

Track two then builds on the themes of track one and consolidates them. The mood and direction of travel for the music has been established before things deconstruct in track three. The pace slows, as do the guitars. We get simple yet effective stop/start riffs that invoke a sense of finality. The drums finally drop to a marching pace further adding to this almost funereal sequence. Then everything collapses into…obscurity on track four; ‘Obscurity’. Desperately simple harmonies are accompanied by clean chanting put through that same distant reverb. The effect is haunting to the point of overbearing considering how bare and minimal the actual musical components are. It is cold, lonely, open music that excels at invoking these feelings within the listener without any flashy adornments; just intelligent writing and production choices.

Forest used techniques universal to black metal: reverb, lo-fi production, tremolo riffs, blast beats, and created something that transcends the sum of these parts into something beautiful. Because all these components are window dressing to the weighty compositional ideas at work behind them.

Originally published at Hate Meditations