Endtime Sermon

The modern turn within black metal has seen it mesh with other music and expand its boundaries beyond recognition. The rhetoric deployed to curate the impulse driving us toward the next big leap in black metal (whatever it may be) is dressed up to be so pragmatic and reasonable that detractors are easily painted as dogmatic, narrow minded traditionalists. But here’s the dirty little secret. The modern wave of post/folk/atmospheric/progressive/psychedelic/or any other prefix black metal is lamentable for the simple fact that it’s boring.

It beggars belief that one could take the most dramatic, vibrant, engaging, over the top form of metal and turn it into something bland, understated, serene, boring. Even the grating avant-gardist turn within black metal so often leads down a path of utter tedium so far removed from the heady promises of these artists and their champions. Where’s the theatre? Where’s the unapologetic arrogance and swaggering soundscapes of hammy melodrama? Or to put it another way: where’s the joy?

This is one but one trend I’ve noted over the last decade or so, and exceptions abound of course. But Marras of Finland caught my ear with their latest release ‘Endtime Sermon’, which might not be the most original or engaging release in terms of pure musical elements. But the presentation is strikingly intense, delivered with a totally unselfconscious passion and carefree joy in its craft that it immediately stands out as a work of authenticity. Despite the cliched melodrama of these pieces, the traditionally evil or epic undertone to many of the riffs, the strained and dense vocalizations, despite all this, ‘Endtime Sermon’ is a work of honest joy and childlike excitement in the face of the potentials of power found within the unique branch of sonic expression that is black metal

The energy and chaotic momentum of the tremolo picked riffs and their dense delivery is reminiscent of Marduk’s ‘Opus Nocturne’, although Marras cover their guitars with far more reverb, creating an atmospheric inertia that grants this album its own aesthetic, the frantic and quickfire pacing of these riffs warrants comparison all the same. Drums are equally choppy. Although breaking from blast-beats for all but brief moments, each run is punctuated by frequent fills and the near constant presence of crash cymbals, as if compelled to make each moment more intense than the last.

Because all the metal instrumentation is pretty much working in overdrive for the lion’s share of this album, there is very little space within the mix for keyboards. But they have been modestly applied in places to enhance the atmospheric qualities of the guitars with gentle strings, and even hamming it up in places with pleasingly cheesy organ tones. There are plenty of keyboard interludes and intros to break up the full throttle black metal passages. These again take on a tragic gothic aesthetic that walks the line between high drama and full on carnival without ever falling off the sincerity wagon. Even during the slower passages – the sombre, funereal march that opens ‘From the Soot of Goahti’ for example – Marras keep the momentum going with a dynamic approach to riffcraft and no laboured repetition of the same idea.

Indeed, this is black metal’s promise of heightened drama, an emotive philosophy uncomfortable to modern ears but at home in a Greek tragedy or Romantic poem. The expressive outlet that this form of black offers for a higher level of unbridled despair and euphoria in the face of existence finds few rivals within contemporary music. It is not the raw components of ‘Endtime Sermon’ – which are fairly typical of traditional black metal – that grab the ear, it is their execution and delivery in such a way as to remind us why black metal has grabbed the imaginations of so many over the years. We do not mourn the dilution of black metal with other forms of music nor the impetus to mutate and crossbreed the rudiments of technique in a quest for musical progression. But we do mourn the fact that these well meaning motivations so often kill the raw heart of this intense form of artistic expression, and in doing so bring us back down to the mundane, the commonplace, the vulgar. ‘Endtime Sermon’ says no to this project, and reasserts the true power that black metal can hold for us if harnessed and deployed with innocence and joy.

Originally published at Hate Meditations