The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness, Part 1

With Panopticon being one of the most revolutionary acts in black metal, let alone metal music as a whole, there's no question as to why the one-manned project has gained such a loyal and vast following. The bands main man, Austin Lunn, has once again failed to disappoint us by giving us what may be his most innovative work yet. With 2018 coming to an end, I dedicate this review to his 2-piece masterwork, Scars of Mankind, and why it has hit the top of my list for albums of 2018.

The album is divided into two parts, the first half being melodic, nature-bound black metal, steeped in atmosphere and aggression. The second, more experimental, half is lonesome, melancholic Appalachian bluegrass Americana, an ode to his homelands beautiful folk music. Both sides are very contrasting to each other, balancing the bands unique black metal sound with his more personal and emotionally provocative chill-out folk music. Lyrically, they represent two sides of the same coin. Part one speaks of the beauty of nature, why we should protect it and not take it for granted. Part two, on the other hand, talks of lonesome urban life. A life where nature has been obscured and the world is dominated by cities and factories, losing the beauty that can only be found in the once nameless wilderness. These factors create the perfect contrast and allows it to flow very well while keeping its sound varied. The album is best listened to when both pieces are listened to back to back, if you wish to obtain the entire atmosphere of the music.

Diving into Part One, there is a lot to talk about. This side of the album just soars with aggressive ambition and melodic structures. Its sound is EXTREMELY unique and varied, while at the same time very flowing. Whether its the tributary melodies to Valfar on Blåtimen, or En Generall Avsky's furious death metal riffage, it all blends together and stays true to the albums objective. The emotion captured in this album truly just grips you and doesnt let go the whole way. This album reaches farther than just the "mount'n man playin' geeterr by the campfer screamin' at some trees" feel. It sounds like Austin is really puttin his soul into this, as if he's playing for his life even. For example, En Hvit Ravns Død (A White Ravens Death in English) bursts the metallic segment of Scars into play, away from the folky opening track and into its raw and brutalizing sound while strangely maintaining its melodic and soulful nature. This is an album of nothing but raw spirit, something that few other modern black metal artists can master. By the end of the end of the album, Lunn ensures that the energy from his musical powerhouse is drained, leaving us questionate of what's to come next.

Contradicting one of my prior statements, Austins energy hadn't been drained completely YET. Part Two begins with the 12 minute long "Moss Beneath The Snow" where Austin proves that he still has it in him to carry on his work into a completely uncharted territory of his discography: the acoustic album. The previously stated track is really the closest to metal Part Two gets, leaning more towards post-rock territory. After this is 50 minutes of Lunns signature classical americana music. There's not as much to get into with this one because I'm not totally experienced with this kind of music other than the fact that it's absolutely beautiful. Personally, I find that "Wandering Ghost" is probably my favorite from this side of Scars and has become one of my ideal songs to just hit play and chill out to, if I'm not just listening to the album as a whole, that is.

There is a lot to be found in Scars of Mankind and carries many different influences from many different genres. This 2 hour treasure absolutely refuses to allow you to get bored when listening to it. Lunn has proved once more of the wonders he is capable of accomplishing. If you have not listened to this work of art yet, I advise that you go ahead and take an hour or two out of your day to listen to it because it's completely worth it. Skal!

Panopticon's return from the depths of the American back-country with The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness marks a new bout of ambition from Austin Lunn, creating a double album with each disc exploring the two genres that helped make Panopticon distinct as the creative force they are today. While it is common to expect very melodic atmospheric black metal out of Panopticon with bluegrass and American folk music blended in, on Scars of Man we see Lunn aiming to expand upon these genres in two largely separate outings that do give us a vast offering of the different kinds of epic, sky-high, melodious songs that still capture the rustic and vibrant essence that Panopticon is known for whether it's doing so with blizzard-like metallic melodies on the first disc, or doing so with the bluegrass echoes of a broken country. While some may pine for Panopticon's older and closer fusions of the two genres, Scars of Man still holds the two genres close to one another, while managing to focus them in their own spaces while delivering a grand-scale work-up of the two styles in one giant, 2-hour medley of soaring black metal and rustic Appalachian folk.

The first part is a rush of very pure and very uplifting black metal melodies that make for a very vast, epic, and expansive sound throughout which is kind of the point of the album, to make you feel as though you are lost in this massive, beautiful wilderness and to appreciate this natural beauty. A lot of the epic and melodic qualities on this first part are heavily informed by Windir, with a lot of their sense of adventure carrying over into Scars of Man, but instead of Viking journeys and Nordic instrumentation we have a picture of the vast, grand Appalachian countryside with a lot of fiddle being woven into the metal that Panopticon is known so well for doing, with “A Ridge Where The Tall Pines Once Stood” serving as a great example with very epic, pioneering fiddle work and slow, rising builds doing a lot. While the fiddle does add plenty of character to these songs and really adds a unique zest to them, that’s not to say this album doesn’t have strong riffs and melodies of its own. “Blåtimen” has some very fleet and melodious riffing with the songs Windir-like triumphant sound serving as a tribute to the departed Valfar of that very band, and “The Singing Wilderness” and “Snow Burdened Branches” do their best to make the multiple layers of melodic guitars sound as enrapturing as possible. The sound of Scars of Man Part 1 is extremely rich with many songs utilizing the aforementioned fiddle, backing choirs, as well as acoustic guitars and banjos to flesh things out and make this feel alive and verdant. Even when it’s just guitars and drums in a standard black metal setup everything sounds very vivid and beautiful with how these riffs and melodies come together. It makes for a great first half of the album devoted to pure, grandiose, naturalistic metal.

That grandiosity and that excess are Scars of Man’s biggest strengths. The album’s often massive song lengths are packed to the brim with very ambitious writing techniques; Builds that swell and rise with the grace of the winds, melodies that feel positively epic and gigantic, many layers to the guitar sound that weave brilliantly between each other, and a feeling of triumph even on the more aggressive and “pure” black metal passages, these elements make the first half into something epic. While there is less of that fusion between Americana and black metal on Part 1, the music is done as solidly as ever with just as much character. It’s the kind of album where the guitar melodies along with other instruments can carry you off in a blizzard while images of vast skies, windy forests, and the vast, spacious mountains of Appalachia are conjured in this melodic maelstrom. It wants to show us a wilderness that’s worth admiring and worth keeping alive and it does that well through the music itself. In short, it’s great.

The second half is an entirely different musical beast. It’s mostly composed of various American folk music types, namely bluegrass as this has been Panopticon’s bread and butter for the folksier side of the band anyways. It’s performed with the expected mixture of acoustic guitars and banjos. Lunn does this genre as honestly and as seriously as he knows how. While there are some songs out there that make the banjos very prominent, the music is played very seriously and with a lot of reserve and respect shown for the lives that Austin Lunn portrays on here as a part of everyday life in redneck America. It sounds very personal, and though his singing may only be mildly decent, it still comes off as very gruff, convicted, and passionate to portray the ins and outs of his lifestyle. The songs vary in style form the narrative bluegrass ballad of “The Wandering Ghost”, the relaxing Pink Floyd-esque light psychedelia of “A Cross Abandoned” that blends a bit of the black metal back in, or the smoking dusty cowboy showdown music of “Beast Rider”. These are all performed well and with plenty of atmosphere to go around. It’s also worth mentioning that when that fiddle comes in it can really send the melody of a song into the next level, this also happens when metallic guitars do make their fleeting, but welcome appearances on part 2. This side gives you a lot of that feeling of being isolated and contemplative out in the countryside.

If the first side was about the grandeur of nature expressed through metal, part 2 is more about man’s experience and place in that wilderness mentioned in the title. Panopticon does question a lot of what modern life is, especially concerning work and fulfillment and that gets explored a lot on this second half. Everything that commonly affects a man in backwoods America is touched on here, moving to the city and getting chewed up by a system of industry, banks, and property owners out to make the most off you, the aggressive foolishness of conservative politics, and just being isolated out in the country with only your work and the peace of the woods around you to look forward to. If Austin Lunn wanted to make this thing personal, he did so with a decent amount of finesse in his guitar and banjo melodies. His folk on Scars of Man isn’t quite up to the level of thrilling as the metal, but it has a solid charm of its own with plenty of conviction to spare. It feels like big music, but still also feels like something that would be sung by any regular man in the hills with something to say.

The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness is a solid 2-hour epic that takes Panopticon’s base styles and then sharpens them both to a point that makes listening to either the metallic part 1 or the folkish part 2 into a vivid and grand experience. It handles both genres great and shows off their separate strengths, making you look from the mountains in awe at the vast lands below you and all the beauty that they hold. Lunn’s epic guitar melodies and blackened vigor make for a more uplifting and epic session, while the second half is far more down-to-earth and personal, but still capturing the same nature-bound and backcountry feeling as the first part. While it may not be consistent in genre with its styles being separated across 2 discs, The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness is consistent with the theme of showing off a natural beauty in the heart of America’s roughest places. Whether cruising through clouds on an electric tremolo melody or trekking through the woods back to your cabin in an acoustic bluegrass piece, the music is full of vigor. While the metal side of things is given more grandiosity, the folk is still very workable and has its own charm to it. The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness does live up to the expectation of a 2-hour double epic with plenty of beautiful songs with a lot of meat to them and some very captivating blends of melody. Safe to say, I found this supremely enjoyable.

A four year gap in albums is an unusual occurrence for the prolific one-man black metal leviathan Panopticon. With such a lull between full lengths, it makes all the sense in the world that Lunn would come raging back into the fold with a massive double album. While always retaining a black metal skeleton, Panopticon has long been a band to play it fast and loose with genre. It's a testament to the man's ingenuity that he could integrate bluegrass into black metal without it coming off as a silly novelty. Whether it be the crusty leaning of his early work or the glimmering post-rock passages of Roads to the North it's clear that Lunn has little respect for genre boundaries. While many bands that attempt this type of genre blurring can't pull it off, Lunn does with flying colours. More than anything, Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness is a celebration of all Panopticon has done and a window into what Lunn will achieve in the future.

The first album isn't a major departure for Panopticon, but it doesn't really sound particularly like any of the other albums. There's a lot more in common than the debut than you might think, there's a fair amount of the earthiness of Kentucky and the Vestiges split; a lot of the Agallochian nature-imbued folk leanings of Autumn Eternal, not to mention the cinematic grandiosity of Roads to the North. The theme for Scars is wilderness, both reverence for the beauty of nature and fear and anger over the destruction of it, as well as the ills of living in an urban environment devoid of it on the second half. Scars I is filled to the brim with the nature aesthetic - wistful wandering tremolo, leads you'd expect on an Agalloch album, cinematic strings over slow burning atmospherics and a fair amount of that rickety blasting style that works so well with atmospheric black metal (the type that was featured prominently on Wędrujący Wiatr's sophomore album if you'd like a reference point). Instrumentally, Austin is as brilliant a multi-instrumentalist as ever. His drumming is rife with blistering blasts and inventive fills. His lead guitar is definitely on point; there's lots of cool leads and "The Singing Wilderness" features a really sweet solo that's equal part melodic metal and evocative classic rock. Both albums were recorded incrementally in cabins and have a much rougher production than the last two Panopticon albums. I know a fair amount of people had a problem with the more hi-fi production, but I loved those albums and thought the production went well with what Austin was going for. However, the rawer production works well with the cabin-in-the-wilderness vibe and it was probably time to scale back the production a bit anyway.

There's a lot of variety on Scars I but the pacing is great and it's all quite aesthetically cohesive. The calming intro sets the mood before we're met with a panoramic view of Panopticon's career thus far. "En Hvit Ravns Død", "The Singing Wilderness" and "Snow Burdened Branches" showcase the band's mastery of long form songwriting, perfectly melding evocative black metal, infectious melody and more atmospheric fare. "Snow Burdened Branches" is a particular highlight and such a great example of a song flawlessly evoking its namesake. "Blåtimen" boasts some of the best leads in the history of melodic black metal. "En Generell Avsky" even flirts with death metal and features one of the best examples of sweep picking being integrated into a riff without it turning out annoying or showboaty. There are some great deeper guest vocals on this song which got me thinking a bit. As much as I like Lunn as a black metal vocalist, his style does get a bit samey and is often a bit distant in the mix. It's hardly a big detriment but it would be nice if he mixed it up a bit or got some more guest vocalists on board in the future.

When Panopticon announced that not only was there an upcoming double album but that one album would be focusing on non-metal, I was really excited. Since instrumental bluegrass has been such a mainstay in Panopticon's sound, I was really hoping for a well produced instrumental bluegrass album. While that would no doubt be better than what we got, Lunn's debut as a singer/songwriter is not a flop. Scars II is largely a mishmash of dark Americana. You've got a fair amount of bluegrass banjo and heaps of old school country and folk music. While often quite subtle, there's a fair amount of post-rock. "The Moss Beneath the Snow" starts as post-rock, which actually makes a lot of sense because it is the logical way to bridge the two disparate albums. There's also a long post-rock section in the penultimate song which honestly doesn't really works and throws off the pacing of the album. The post-rock itself is fine (if not remarkable) but it just doesn't work in the context of the album. Post-rock sometimes pops up in understated ways on a few of the shorter songs and I'm not sure they're any better for it. Lunn is at his best here at his most country-folk. The dude isn't necessarily the best clean vocalist, but this isn't always to his detriment. His performance is quite heartfelt and the songs rarely call for technical chops. All we need to do is to look at Bob Dylan and Neil Young's standout albums to see you don't need to have a good voice to be a great singer/songwriter (I don't even think the songs would work half as well without their unusual voices). Hell, even Townes Van Zandt - clearly one of Lunn's biggest influences (not to mention one of the greatest songwriters and lyricists to have ever lived) - was never particularly technically gifted in his vocal chops.

Scars II is a respectable first volley into the singer/songwriter world, but it does come off as inconsistent. Some songs are simply way more memorable than others. "Beast Rider" is a clear standout, featuring utterly beautiful acoustic guitar, haunting somber vocal melodies, poetic storytelling lyrics and some nice light accompaniment. This kind of reminds me of "Rake" by Townes Van Zandt, which is just about the best compliment I could ever give. "The Wandering Ghost" is really cool. The gruff half-narration, half-singing vocal approach works well with the lyrics, the Great Depression vibes are palpable and the interplay between the bass and banjo is fantastic. "Echoes In the Snow" is a great slab of rough and loose blue collar country. It's very simple, but the instrumentation and approach make all the sense in the world when considering the lyrics. "The Itch" is by far the biggest missed opportunity of the album. The finger picking is beautiful and there's such a nice baritone vocal melody, but they end up severely marred by some really bad lyrical choices. "The Itch" is a protest song about the Donald Trump presidency and there's just no way in hell it isn't going to sound extremely dated even 15 years from now. Look, I have nothing against political lyrics in and of themselves and in the old days of Panopticon Lunn did a good job at not falling into the trap he did here. The lyrics are just too on-the-nose and fall into the age-old writing trap of telling rather than showing. Look, there's a reason Amebix's deceleration of "No Gods, No Masters!" was enduring and the words of your whatever 80s hardcore band ranting about Reagan being such an asshole have faded into obscurity. Amebix took the right approach with their perennial scope, speaking to enduring notions of freedom and power struggle rather than getting bogged down in the minutiae of the politics of the day. Another approach worth trying would have been lik that on Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska where he took a storyteller approach in which the implications of sociopolitical circumstances were weaved into the fabric of the narrative. I'm not saying that topical to-the-point protest songs can't work; I'm saying they are the exception rather than the rule and "The Itch" falls into the later category. Lyrics like "Closing off the border/Rapid fire executive orders/Implement your immigration policy" just come off as sophomoric and clunky.

I was pondering the highlights of Scars II and I realized there were some patterns about what made them great. The best songs were not the songs that seemed like a songwriter extension to the Panopticon discography at large, but where Lunn dives headlong into country-folk. The post-rock influence in particular doesn't really jive with the dark Americana vibes. The best songs also featured lyrics that focused on storytelling. Storytelling is a big part of why I like old country and it looks like Lunn has a knack for it. Some of the songs with more contemplative lyrics do end up bordering on being earnest to the point of being awkward. The best songs don't overstay their welcome. There's no reason any song here should have been over six minutes and the two very long songs end up making the album way longer than it should have been (it doesn't help that the second half of the first song has the worst songwriter stuff on the album). Overall, you can hardly blame Lunn for having a few hiccups on his debut as a singer/songwriter and despite my gripes it is still worthwhile and the highlights are fantastic.

Scars of the Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness is a wildly ambitious double album and while not the highlight of Panopticon's storied career it is a welcome addition to the discography. It does suffer from overshadowing - Scars I is a cohesive and consistently high quality metal album and Scars II is an inconsistent foray into singer/songwriter territory steeped in dark Americana atmosphere. Scars II easily has some excellent high points, but it still comes as a minor disappointment after the triumph of the metal side. This is just a thought but it would actually be really cool to see Panopticon do a trilogy of double albums (hey, it worked for Swans) following the same formula of one metal album and one non-metal album. For the next one it would be really dope if he did a full album of well-produced bluegrass like the bookend tracks to Kentucky and "One Last Fire". For the last it would be sweet to see maybe a mix of that and singer/songwriter (no doubt he'll only get better with time) or just an improved version of what he started with Scars II. Complaints about what the second disc could have been aside, Scars is a strong effort and well worth a Panopticon fan's time.