Heilige dwazen

Well this album might take a fair few spins for people to get used to this Belgian band's shambolic and woozy combination of black (brown?) metal and lager-swilling farmyard jazz. Or should that read jazz and lager-swilling farmyard black (brown?) metal? Whatever it is, once you realise that the music's meant to be all over the house and the lyrics in particular pertain to bodily functions associated with a ubiquitous household plumbing fixture, you may find a whimsical and oddball charm in Lugubrum's music. Usually this kind of metal isn't at all associated with jazz or farming folk unless it be to burn down their wooden or weatherboard barns and churches and convert the congregation to paganism.

In among the blurred guitars, scuzzy riffs, the sometimes frantic rhythms, very basic production skills and the howling reverb-treated vocals, the use of saxophone introduces a melodic element around which the other instruments and the vocals swirl and challenge each other. As might be expected, the tracks don't seem all that clear in themselves and the album is best heard as a whole with the tracks treated as chapters or variations in an overall sprawl. The track titles themselves suggest as much as they're treated as lyrics in one song so there may or may not be some inter-relationship among all the tracks. Eventually all the songs reach a goal in a strange netherworld where a little doll chuckles evilly while playing a cheap hurdy gurdy. Not quite the blasted nihilistic release from life you'd expect!

This being Lugubrum's sixth album, the guys have had plenty of time "refining' their particular brand of sloppy BM-jazz. The odd and sacrilegious thought has occurred to me that if Lugubrum were American or Japanese, the music would flop around a lot more than it does and risk losing its eccentric charm and as a result sound more contrived. The territory Luguburm lurch around in suddenly looks fraught with perils in navigation and perhaps the tension involved in combining jazz and BM and steering a path through that fusion that makes Lugubrum an interesting and endearing band. The music admittedly isn't very brilliant but it does have charm.

An original version of this review appeared in The Sound Projector (Issue 15) in 2007.