Red Blood, White Frost

So I haven't entertained myself with much black metal-related, leftist musical output since Jarost Marksa were ruffling feathers of the proto-alt-rightists and moral relativists a decade and a half or so ago. Sure, I still own the first Iskra LP, Panopticon's "Kentucky" and Sorgsvart's "Vikingtid og AnArki". I've seen Wolves in the Throne Room live a few times, chuckled at Neckbeard Deathcamp's trolling shenanigans, marveled at the alleged rawness of Marxthrone and periodically frequented the erstwhile RABM blogspot. To my dismay, a prelim gander at the RABM Instagram page (just to refresh my memory, you understand) revealed how much of a boat I missed (from older obscurities like Agony's "Sickle and Hammer" to contemporary darlings like Dawn Ray'd), including the pioneering Profecium (who gleefully, and quite literally, enmeshed the Latin American leftist posturing with fragrant Satanism on "Socialismo Satánico"). As we know, in terms of sheer numbers, commies remain a minority in the black metal ghetto yet numerous enough to stake a discernible niche, with various leftist shades and stripes well represented. You have your anarchists, anti-fascists and environmentalists, some feminists, full-fledged commies and wannabe revolutionaries all plowing their métier, much like their ideological antitheses on the other end of the spectrum.

Now, the subject of today's missive cultivate the specifically Soviet-themed, WWII-centered territory (and could be treated as war metal through and through, conceptually speaking, yet it is unlikely that many would confuse it with Blasphemy on musical grounds, of course), though (unlike KYPCK, who aren't even BM but still) not merely for historiographical purposes. "Red Blood, White Frost" is dedicated to all "comrades who fought fascist invaders", which, naturally, leads me to conclude that the members of Soyuz do not quite fancy the now-thankfully long gone, said fascist invaders. How do the members of Soyuz express their disdain? Considerably angrily so, though rather unhurriedly. Soyuz produce quite a dense, raw sound here, which propels the band's threnody-like compositional focus considerably well, which, in light of markedly buried vocals and drums, digs in its feet pretty monolithically. It could be suitable for DSBM, I suppose, if production wasn't a bit too chaotically seething, though perhaps that's what might actually align it with, if I may be so brash, the Blazebirth Hall sound, if the latter was afflicted with comatose, dirge-like qualities.

Granted, both the opener "The Great War Has Come" and the following "An Arduous Battle Awaits Us" contain comparatively brisk, if brief, sections somewhere down the line. Both are well composed, via simple if perspicacious, old-school riff-craft. The band's stately and effective variation on Chopin's immortal (pun intended) classic entitled "Funeral March - Lament for the Fallen Comrades" could be something of a highlight, I'd venture to say. But I digress, for “Red Blood…” includes covers of two Soviet-era classics, which, in musical terms, perceptibly cut across the contents of the band’s original compositions. And herein is the underlying issue: Soyuz attempted to juggle two very different melodic sensibilities, and the Soviet (which, for starters, is specifically 20th century encapsulated) does not necessarily synthesize all that well with the still traditionally blackened (that prefers to look back at the mysterious dark past, “buried by time and dust”, to quote the classic of the genre) that Soyuz themselves have sired here, in the way that traditionalism and modernism are on the different sides of the fence. Cover of "The Red Army Is the Strongest!" is most symptomatic in this regard, even in its blackened form, although "The Sacred War" fares better due, in no small part, to the conspicuously more dirge-like qualities of the original. In this regard, "And They Rode to Stalingrad" is, to this set of ears, the only original composition attempting (inadvertently?) to reach a semblance of synergy. It is the most Nordic sounding track, on the one hand, I’d say. On the other, its melodic leitmotif could arguably, in some vague manner, place adjacently to some vintage Soviet anthem...

Not to say that modern black metal carrying, say, a strong urban, or altogether contemporary, flair cannot be begotten these days. Yet, I wonder how many leftist BM musicians consciously contemplate this. To reiterate, the communist project was at least supposed to be a modernist concept on paper, in acute opposition to the traditionalist aesthetics and their "radicalist" extremes (or, for instance, "conservative anarchism", as someone once put it for me). Question is whether a truly distinctive BM variant could ever be originated by musicians of opposing socio-political persuasion. As it stands, the answer is negative, not only because it is unfeasible musically, most likely, but because it is ultimately unnecessary. You see, in reality BM was/is merely another post-modernist subculture and, really, could not be anything else, try as people such as Vikernes may have. "Red Blood, White Frost" is a twisted example of this bone of contention. The band's original material still pays tribute to BM's archetypal musical mores, while trying to break away from its original aesthetics by bringing in elements formally traditional yet arguably as foreign at their core as many of the avant-garde excursions the genre toyed with over the years. The result is, well, still post-modern, all too post-modern. Or did I mean to say human, all too human?

This is an album inspired by the eastern front conflict of the Second World War, known in the Soviet Union (and later Russia and the former Soviet Union states) as the Great Patriotic War.

It sets the tone by beginning with an extract from Josef Stalin’s famous November 7, 1941 speech when Nazi forces were only a few kilometers from Moscow. The quality of this introductory recording hisses and crackles with age – informing the sound of the whole album. When the first track begins the sound is highly distorted guitar riffs – distortion severe enough that what I assume is tremolo picking nearly blurs into single long notes. Its hard to overemphasize the level of guitar distortion here, it sounds like the buzzing of thousands of angry insects – at times almost white noise – and this guitar sound is dominant through the whole album, overshadowing drums, vocals and any other instruments used.

The drums are simple and sound distant, but don’t lose their sense of heaviness completely. It feels like they were recorded from the room next door, with the guitar tone clearly taking central position. If cymbals are being played, then they blend completely into the buzzing guitar tone.

Vocals are sporadic, distant, distorted, deep-ish black metal howls that could often be mistaken for a howling wind. Sometimes they are barely audible behind drums and guitar – blending into the fuzzy assault. In addition to these black metal vocals, some tracks like “The Red Army is the Strongest!” are covers of Soviet war songs with distant sounding choir recordings.

Songs are dirge-like, driven by slow and mournful riffs, with occasional bursts of speed. They evoke marching to war, despair, duty, inexorability and inescapable fate, along with the hope for a better world. Sometimes they seem to devolve completely into noise especially “The Sacred War (towards Victory)”. Beyond the first track some of the other tracks are introduced with Soviet speeches, and have Soviet choir recordings mixed in – it would be easy to either dismiss this as a novelty, or to over-praise it for the same novelty, but it meshes together with the atmosphere and concept of the album to form what feels like a fully realized package.

Production wise it does an excellent job of coming across as “black metal lo-fi” while still having a great depth of sound and tone with lots of layers to find with careful listening, if the abrasiveness doesn’t get to you first. It doesn’t have the “thin-ness” of instruments which characterize a 2nd wave Norwegian black metal sound, instead sounding full, cacophonous and atmospheric – an album to carry you away to distant, horrifying battlefields.

It could perhaps be classified as simultaneously very raw and very atmospheric. With a largeness to the recording despite its raw tone – as if someone had gone to record an atmospheric black metal album filtered through layer upon layer of distortion. It feels like a fantastic debut for what it sets out to do and one of my favorite black metal releases of 2020 so far; but the rawness, chaos and general pummeling the listener receives could conceivably be very off-putting.