Voland III: Царепоклонство - Il culto degli Zar

Any budding metal band looking for some heady historical material to hang their music on can’t go wrong with Russian history. So it is with Voland, an Italian symphonic black metal outfit of sorts, who – on their latest EP ‘Voland III: Царепоклонство – Il culto degli Zar’ (the cult of the Tsars) – take us on an epoch jumping journey through some of the key events of pre-Communist Russia, specifically concerning the relationship between the aristocracy and the wider popoulation.

This is an example of metal serving a dual function of offering a musical experience alongside educational material, one that encourages further reading into the subject matter on the part of the listener. The music itself is polished, cinematic, symphonic metal that gives the likes of Batushka a run for its money. Voland are as steeped in their source material as Nile, as capable of doing justice to the high drama of the events they are treating as any modern theatre company, and perhaps most importantly all the compositions reflect the dramatic and ambiguous moral centre at the heart of these historical narratives.

This is the end of the line as far as the “metal” element is concerned in symphonic metal, the latter being almost completely absorbed into the former. There are metallic touchstones certainly, a black metal riff here, a doom metal passage there. But the focus is on bringing rich orchestration and orthodox Russian musical traditions into the fray, and letting these dictate the shape of the composition. These pieces eschew the linear momentum and motion of conventional metal, preferring instead to use metal techniques to heighten the drama of music that is very much of Russia (at least pre-Communist Russia).

The vocals certainly make use of death growls, but at this point it feels like this is a concession to the demands of a metal audience rather than an aesthetic choice on the part of Voland. Primarily the vocals shoot for a style of Russian liturgical chanting. The same can be said of the way the music is arranged. There are conventional metal riffs that lead us from one passage to the next, but these are presented more as linking phrases between the chief themes, which are articulated through traditional Cossack music, Russian orthodox spiritual music, and hints of classical music of the romantic era. It’s all highly ambitious for a four track EP with two bonus tracks of live material.

Additional reading material is not something I usually care for in metal releases, as I believe the music should stand or fall independent of excessive curation. But in the case of Voland, Russian history is just that fascinating and so fully integrated into these compositions that we’ll give this EP a pass in its overt encouragement on the part the listener to read around the ideas behind it.

The opening track ‘Casa Ipatiev’ deals with perhaps the most well-known historical event concerning the Tsars, the assassination of the last Tsar Nicholas II at the hands of the Bolsheviks, along with his entire family. We are also treated to an account of Ivan the terrible, the first Tsar of a united Russia, who took the name of the title from the Caesars of Rome, thus asserting that the Tsars had all the authority and heritage of the Roman Emperors of old. ‘Promontorio’ deals with the Cossack Stepan Razin who led an uprising against the nobility in 1670. The final track of the EP itself (excluding the bonus live tracks) is ‘Suite russe’, which takes a look at the European obsessions of the Russian aristocracy of the 19th Century, blinding them to the suffering and growing resentment of the masses.

This last track proves to be a neat way to tie these themes together, and the scope of the music reflects this. The concoction of ancient aristocracy and rituals with a nation begging to enter the modern age. The noble intentions of liberating the people from their mass squalor leading to the bloodiest violence imaginable. The hubris of divine rights. Metal blended with traditional orchestration is a form of music uniquely situated to treat this complex subject matter.

Originally published at Hate Meditations