Boreal Despair

Let’s be right about this, ‘Boreal Despair’, the debut full length from SkyThala, is a Weird album. The capitalisation is deliberate, because SkyThala’s quirks are entirely deliberate. This is a premeditated attempt to turn black metal conventions on their head, frustrating our expectations in the process. But there’s an odd bombast to the idiosyncratic way in which this outfit throw out the garden variety script. They do this not through a convoluted exercise in dissonance or a collision of unconventional instrumentation. Timbre wise ‘Boreal Despair’ holds few surprises as far as black metal is concerned, tinny drums, trebly guitars, light synths, piercing howls of despair.

It is rather through their odd mix of key, phrasing, and pacing that SkyThala manage to subvert the traditional black metal framework. But the barrage of the Weird is not constant. The album toys with solid segments of rather conventional Nordic style black metal, as if to lull the listener into a false sense of security – or to make them feel at ease in their musical prejudices – before delivering an outrageously jaunty major key lick, a neoclassical guitar interlude, or an extended pageant of horns and brass that breaks down the enraged momentum of the music’s extreme metal DNA.

Over time this develops into a tense push and pull between sinister triumphalism and exhilarating yet undeniably eerie black metal. But more importantly, ‘Boreal Despair’ is totally at ease with itself. The music itself is likely to pose as odder for those actually well versed in black metal convention. This is purely a function of our own pre-programmed conceptions of what this genre should sound like in the particular textural permutation than SkyThala are working within, which is ultimately just a set of arbitrary musical conventions based on the culminative build up of historical progression.

This album does not exist simply to smash stylistic boundaries, nor for any overtly avant-garde end. Rather, it starts from its own premise, one totally distinct from the white noise of extreme metal’s well documented genre politics. If absorbed free of the fanfare of comparative listening it becomes clear that SkyThala are completely embroiled in their own Weird sound world, one that does occasionally overlap with our own, but then only coincidentally. What follows is a tense, unpredictable, yet oddly fluid and cohesive experience of ambiguous, unfolding tonal depictions that flow and fold into new and utterly novel forms with clear referents of departure and unity with the contemporary picture that surrounds it.

Originally published at Hate Meditations