Haudalla/Virta

Almost short enough to be considered a single and almost long enough to be a mini-album, this debut recording from four-piece band Kuilu is a fine example of dramatic atmospheric BM with dark Gothic touches. The scene is set with a darkly menacing short instrumental of rumbling guitar drone that surges back and forth like sinister waves on a black beach and which then leads into the long song "Haudalla" ("Grave"). Perhaps taking its cue from the intro, "Haudalla" itself flows from one extreme of powerful blasting black metal to deeply sorrowful passages of swooping melodic post-metal guitar. All instruments work as one, the drums switching from blast-beat anger one moment to slow funereal beats the next and back again. The vocals add a painful bleeding-raw texture that highlights the melancholy. Even the dark atmosphere takes an active role in parts where actual music retreats to a solo guitar plucking out forlorn tones. Second song "Virta" ("Power") follows in a similar vein, veering from fairly slowish post-metal surliness to slabs of gritty blackened doom guitar riffing, to quiet sections of solo guitar meditation in shadows cast by the looming darkness.

The to-and-fro swell of the music, their drama and the high emotion sometimes reached demonstrate a good grasp of sound dynamics and skill in music composition. The group has worked hard on these songs and the musicians' efforts are consistently good. At the same time though, there's a lot more these songs could offer; for one thing, the contrast between the more aggressive parts of the songs and their quieter sections isn't strong enough and in both songs, there's probably too much going back and forth between the extremes of loudness and softness, so they start to sound the same. While the production is good and emphasises the band's raw edges, it doesn't do the same for the deeper bass sound so the band sounds a bit top heavy. This probably robs some of the potential for high drama in the two songs: the more powerful parts of the music would come over even more forcefully with a solid bass backing and the contrasts between the music's power and its more delicate moments would be even more vast.

The singing is not bad but there are moments where the music almost drowns it out or sidelines it to irrelevance. When the instrumental music corners all the atmosphere, the emotion and drama, there's really not much room for a vocalist with a limited range of pitch and emotion to do anything other than deliver the necessary lyrics and then just get the hell out of the way. If the vocals were more varied in range and tone, or if an extra singer were brought on board, the singing would then become more integrated with the music and add interest, more emotion and impetus to songs.

As it is, the recording is a good introduction to Kuilu's style and likely direction in atmospheric black metal / post-metal / doom. The band should consider including more acoustic guitar and piano, maybe the odd violin or cello, and work some heavier bass guitar into their music.

There is absolutely nothing on this earth as emotionally devastating as a lovingly crafted black metal song. Three of my absolute favorite things in black metal are Cosmic Church, Blood Red Fog, and that wonderful and criminally overlooked Korgonthurus full-length, so when I stumbled across the Lappeenranta-based band Kuilu, who play homage to those three things in brutally melancholic lamentations, I was sold on them almost immediately.

I've had quite a long while to let this thing sit with me now, earning countless listens, and I've come to the conclusion that this two-song demo exists entirely without fault. After a hazy swarm of buzzing, feedbacky backmasked guitar drones enters then subsides while a piano plunks away at a childlike melody as the intro comes to a close, the hauntingly beautiful waltz-time of "Haudalla" kicks you directly in the gut and takes no pity on you as it continues to stack on layer and layer of melancholy. First, the ascending/descending main theme is played out a couple of times as slow single notes then arpeggiated picked chords, before the full weight of the band comes crashing in to deliver the same motif in surging tremolo-picked chords. Hoarse shouts, not unlike those used in Andy Marshall's new project Saor, belt out an ode to the grave while that relentlessly sad main theme cycles through a number of iterations and variations both savage and subdued. Five minutes in and the drums drop to a shuffle, the bass keeping the melody going while a lonesome lead guitar wails on two alternating key notes of the ever-present motif, before all percussion falls away and leaves the guitars to commiserate again for a while. Then, inevitably, that intro guitar pattern returns before the tremolo comes back with redoubled force. After our lonesome lead plays a dead simple pair of solos far off in the distance behind the fog of chords, the tension mounts and the lead guitar morphs into suicide blues before some roaring jet engine noise deconstructs the audio while the intro track's piano returns to give us a preview of "Virta"'s theme as "Haudalla" rattles to a close.

Abandoning the death waltz for plain old 4/4, the steadily downpicked chords that open Virta call to mind a downtempo version of the music that soundtracks that brilliant climax scene of the Michael Mann version of Last of the Mohicans (which also happens to be one of my favorite bits of music in all of film-dom). That more folky melody shifts into a more straightforward verse riff, then shifts again before fading away entirely, leaving the deliciously rich bass to ponder death naked and alone for a moment, soon rejoined by a single guitar, before eventually the whole band storms back in to stomp on your heart again for a while. As in "Haudalla," here we bear witness to the band's expert use of dynamics, wringing the absolute most of relatively simple melodies by use of repetition, subtle variations, a bit of good ol' soft/loud contrast and the ebb and flow of crescendo. Every time a particular melody is brought back into the fold, it's done so with maximum emotional force, and every single time it's the most welcome of relief, it's all you ever wanted.

Something you see and hear pretty often is people talking about such and such black metal album being perfect listening for a walk in the woods. The idea always seemed a bit cheesy to me, plus I always had this sort of sneaking feeling that no matter how much whatever albums people advocated for woods-listening worshiped nature, the humanity of it and undeniable modernness brought about by distorted electric guitars always seemed like a roadblock for me; I'd rather listen to ancient-sounding folk music or better yet, no music at all and just focus on the sounds of nature itself. A couple of weeks ago, though, I thought, what the hell, I'll bring my mp3 player with me on a hike up one of the region's mountains. The weather was beautiful and it was the last weekend of truly breathtaking fall foliage (I returned to the same trail the following weekend and explosions of reds and yellows were replaced with a uniform red-brown interspersed with barren limbs) and I put on a playlist of things in my collection that gave me the most explicitly autumnal vibes, including this EP. Well, I can tell you with certainty now that there's not a whole lot in the world that can compare with listening to this while sitting on the top of a forested Korean ridge-line, just above a row of grass-covered burial mounds that overlook a dramatic, plunging valley. I was only a 20-minute bus ride from the bustling city where I live, but I haven't felt so close to nature in a long, long time, and those 25 minutes were among the closest I've come to understanding spirituality.

This is perfect.