The Heritage of Past Gods

Celtic Frost’s ‘Into Pandemonium’ was an interesting watershed for extreme metal. Despite the mixed response at the time and the album’s undeniable inconsistencies, it should be credited for strengthening metal’s relationship to eccentricity. In 1987, at the height of down-the-barrel thrash, heavy metal bombast, and burgeoning underground extremity, came this unsure, faltering and unbearably weird collection of pop metal, neoclassical doom, and experimentalism, all enveloped in a downbeat, ‘Sorrows of Young Werther’ style romanticism. The album creeks under this burden and ultimately sowed the seeds for Celtic Frost’s demise. But it opened a door, one which only a few walked through at first. And as the bizarre peaks and troughs of the 1990s unfolded, pockets of doom and symphonic metal began to revisit the potential of imbuing metal with this sense of grandiose melodrama and the tragedian spirit.

When looking back at Pik's 'The Heritage of Past Gods' in this context, it becomes more apparent how limiting modern doom metal can be. It seems constantly mired in a sense of stasis – the drugged fuelled haze of stoner, the endless cathartic release of melodic death/doom, the contrived and overworked miseries of modern funeral doom – all seem stuck in conveying one extreme emotional state in order to freeze it in time. By comparison, when looking at the mazes of the eerie that the likes of Pik were unfolding in the 1990s it’s remarkable just how much motion and life is present in their work. It grows, adapts, evolves, and flows like a bombastic opera of the macabre.

Maybe a flower too odd to last in the blooming, of their two LPs, the debut ‘The Heritage of Past Gods’ released in 1999 is honestly like nothing you’ve heard before. Despite this phrase’s overuse in today’s hyperbolic world of music criticism, I certainly don’t use it lightly here. “Demilich playing gothic doom metal” is about as good an approximation as I can manage. This is undulating, ponderous, pulsing dark metal with a truly esoteric approach to melodic construction and arrangement. The delivery would be almost comical – much like Demilich – were it not for the conviction and unprecedented aligning of elements into a conflagration of the unspeakably strange.

Pik seemed to set out with a sketch of gothic opera in mind, to which the metallic elements were almost an afterthought, a mere means by which to put meat on the bones of their vision. Riffs are incidental to this endeavour. The guitar tone is deep and murky, relegating the instrument to a presence rather than a centrepiece. They flesh out the mix with rich and pulsing energy. Although there are definitely droning doom riffs and melodies one could hum, the guitars are merely harnessed to lend gravitas and weight to the proceedings. They are positioned as the unsteady foundation, atop which the energy of the vocals and keyboards are free to play their part as the real dictators of narrative on these pieces.

One could be forgiven for ignoring the drums almost entirely on the first few spins of ‘The Heritage of Past Gods’. On the whole they fail to make their presence known beyond mere metronomic qualities. But when one does laser in the performance it is actually a pretty solid example of how to inject character and energy into doom metal from a percussive perspective. I’ve gone on record many times as saying that drums are the most important instrument in doom metal. With so much space to fill out between riffs and chords it’s essential for the drums to give us some much needed context, an anchor in the dark. But if this is overworked it can overpower the subtle despair that the many iterations of the genre are ultimately trying to convey. The performance on ‘The Heritage of Past Gods’ is an exemplar of this balance.

Rich keyboard textures flesh out the vacant space left by the guitars, with deep organs, strings, and synth tones all carrying the narrative arc of each piece. Vocals are predominantly kept clean, opting for an almost comical gothic rock delivery. But in the sonic scenery Pik have painstakingly built to encase this performance it feels entirely appropriate as Henry Beck’s idiosyncratic delivery unfolds. The heavily accented delivery of English language lyrics is deeply unnerving. It’s not just the tone of his voice or the unpredictable builds and falls of intensity and pitch. It’s the fact that he places syllables in unexpected places, splicing certain lines and even single words together in weird chimera’s of poetry. I have a feeling such an unstable approach to cadence and phrasing would not have occurred to a native English speaker, but it gives rise to one of the many charms of this album.

Tempo wise Pik are relatively fast for doom metal. The music plods along with intentional consistency. Bizarre pauses in percussion and distorted guitar leave space for tension as synths and clean guitar arpeggios bridge the gaps, only to lead into an up-tempo guitar solo. It’s aesthetic choices such as these – made appropriate by the very fact that they are so inappropriate – that gives ‘The Heritage of Past Gods’ its unfathomable yet enduring appeal. One is never quite sure – even after a number of listens – how the music will ooze from one passage to the next, or what unearthly musical thread will pulsate out of the bubbling lacquer to dominate the soundscape.

‘The Heritage of Past Gods’ taps into a long and proud legacy. One that sees gothic melodrama meet science fiction, with a strong undercurrent of tragedian philosophy neath this dense conceptual material. It is in this light that we must study this album. Any analysis from the perspective of doom metal is almost redundant. This puts it in good company, as far as the canon of metal is concerned the best works often transcend their genre entirely. In descrying their greatness we let go of the mechanics of stylistic hair-splitting or the agreed standards of form. The music is reaching for a more universal means of communication. Sure, this is a gothic doom metal album, but this classification is a mere afterthought to us witnessing it as anything other than an utterly unique moment in music.

Originally published at Hate Meditations