Because It's Wrong

Verge emanate a discomforting aura through a deliberately off-kilter cadence, a dissonant ring and clash of shrill and off-tuned instruments that sounds as if a rock and roll band led by the disheveled organist on the cover was possessed by the devil. A dark, eerie organ sets the tone of a decrepit hall with a muddied harshness through which uneasy tones echo. Everything has a feeling of being played through old stereo equipment that doesn't sound quite right, tones clashing while the band maintains a menacingly loose swagger that fits the atmosphere perfectly. While undeniably wrought through the portal of black metal, the wandering nature of the guitars and bass mix with the eerie organ in a way that feels like old hard rock channeling unearthly discordance. Is this Iron Butterfly possessed by the devil? Perhaps. There's an unearthly tormentor burning these souls, their suffering manifested through sorrowful crooning and the discordant clash of instruments. The humanity of it shines as each piece tries to escape. The guitar trails off and wanders in contrasting, consonant leads which have a humble folk touch, a soulful blues-tinge coloring them. The organist constructs a long dirge which stands on its own, a dingy cathedral-filling ode to ruin. That track leads into a Tenhi cover, where the vocalist begins to sing clean, the human counterpart to his normally-possessed mournful croon. This is unorthodox, incongruent music. Because it's wrong.

Blood Red Fog enter Verge's state of mind for the second half of this album, deviating from their prior works to make this album whole. Verge's tracks were recorded in 2008, while BRF recorded these in 2009, and the way they continue Verge's themes and explore their state of mind in the embodiment of Blood Red Fog is an excellent complement. Likewise, Verge's style shifts towards one more complementary to BRF towards the end of the first half, including a tense tremolo buildup during "Traction."

This half returns to a more normal cadence, as this band shapes their music primarily with melodies. They transition with a slow, nightmarish passage which echoes the tortured theme. Parts of this are strong, distinctly Finnish melodies in a more traditional black metal form, but these deviations focus on shaping a different side of the band's sound in an unusual, twisted voicing. The emphasis on tormented, mid-paced sections is an interesting contrast, as the band explores morbidity rather than death itself. Their normally focused, occultist death worship is strung out and a feeling of unease festers in its presence. The guitars provide the brunt of the discomfort, while the vocals are mixed pretty low and the bass is less active than it is in their other works. The journey here starts with the most characteristically dissonant, Verge-sounding track in "Spiritual Promiscuity" and ends with BRF's "Bleak Water" which is only lightly tinted with Verge's weirdness, being the most similar to BRF's other works. Still, this album seems to be the conceptual creation of Verge.

Isn't that right?

Verge have always been perhaps the most challenging band to get into out of all of the bands in that general "Finnish black metal bands that Shatraug is not involved in" scene, of which both Verge and Blood Red Fog are major players. Nestled squarely between Verge's two full lengths and in the middle of Blood Red Fog's series of splits with their comrades in darkness, this split captures the essential spirits of both bands quite ably, while also showing how diverse that little microcosmos of black metal can be while simultaneously retaining some of that same quintessentially Finnish spirit.

I think it's a fairly safe bet to suppose that the idea for this split was spearheaded by Verge rather than BRF. The cover art, featuring a slack-jawed, bespectacled mouse of a man plunking away at an organ while the walls and furnishings around him crumble into ruin is rendered as a simple sketch, which seems far more Verge-ish than something that would adorn the cover of BRF's more typically somber and occult offerings. Then, there's the fact that Verge have the honor of playing the title track and having their songs come first on the album. They kick things off with a demented circus melodica tune, featuring demented histrionic vocals and a complete lack of black metal guitar riffing that emphasizes the band's penchant for weird experimental stuff.

But not to fear, because that first track is really just sort of all the strangeness of the band's unique brand of black metal extracted, distilled, and placed at the very front of the album just to catch you off guard and set the bizarre pace. On the rest of their tracks, the band favors a midtempo bouncing groove, often led by a thumping, melodic and adventurous bassline while the raw-toned guitars scathe away to the sides and the keyboards and melodicas add a layer of subtle, queasy haze over everything. The endless well of talent that is Charnel Winds' Shu-Ananda (later a full-time member of Blood Red Fog), here credited as "Again," supplies wailing soulful lead guitars to the rolling, dreary waltz of the album's title track.

As the album progresses, the band pulls back some of the layers of psychotic weirdness and piles on heaps and heaps more devastating, claustrophobic depression. "Miser Psalmus" is the audio representation of the album artwork, brooding organs and melodica leads wax suicidal while formless moaned vocals float nearly out of earshot while the whole mix threatens to crackle and combust. Finnish neofolk band Tenhi's "Hiensynty" is rendered in punky Finnblack glory, complete with earnestly sung clean vocals that put a more overtly human spin on the sorrow Verge have been piling on throughout their half of the split. "Traction" brings back some of that queasy weirdness, with a trippy jazz drumbeat and nauseating, circling guitar melody, but it's not long before that song succumbs to the negativity that haunts all of Verge's music, Wrong's absolutely commanding throat-searing screams sucking all of the momentum out of the propulsive rhythms as the song climaxes into a double-speed mutant version of Blood Red Fog's dreary melodicism.

Ah, and then Blood Red Fog get to fuck with you for the remainder of the split. Taking a queue from their stranger brethren in Verge, BRF and Co. open with the aptly named "Rite of Madness." Sounding sort of like a nightmare version of their typical sound, strung out on opiates and locked away in some terrifying meat circus, the guitar riffs morph into these abstract sawtooth forms, possibly the result of some manner of tape manipulation done after the fact. The rest of the song sees the band shift through unpleasant, backwards combinations of notes that make up its schizoid riffs, while still maintaining a strongly "BRF-ish" presence, largely carried by touches of Finnish melody and groove that assert themselves ever so slightly no matter how jerky off-kilter the rhythms get. BRF's voice isn't quite in top form here, sounding a bit muffled and cleaner than usual, without as much of his trademark echo, though he's also mixed a bit further back than is often the case for him.

As interesting as it is hearing Blood Red Fog step a bit outside of their comfort zone to soundtrack a descent into madness rather than expound on the virtues of death worship, and despite the captivating ways in which they do so (check the blaring UFO keyboards in "Flesh Altar"), the material here simply isn't quite as strong as that on the releases that the band was recording in the years surrounding this split. There are some great riffs and melodies here, not to mention some of the band's more energetic lead guitar work in their catalog, but the somewhat forced-feeling focus on the more abstract weird stuff distracts from it. Only the album-closing "Bleak Waters" really sounds like a "normal" Blood Red Fog track, complete with shuffling drum beats and weepy bass guitar melodies that bubble up through the sad waltz.

So, while the Blood Red Fog tracks on Because It's Wrong are mostly more of a curio in the band's otherwise excellent discography, the utterly bonkers Verge tracks form a vital part of that band's oeuvre. Fans of Verge and outsider black metal in general will be doing themselves a great disservice by skipping out on this split, but those whose tastes lean more toward the traditional will surely find better places to start in their explorations of Blood Red Fog's death cult hymns. Nonetheless, this is a bizarre trek through the stranger side of Finland's black metal underground.