Om undergång och de tretton järtekn

There are a lot of black metal bands that bill themselves as “primitive”; a lot of them are the raw black metal bands that get away with calling themselves raw by recording their instruments with a 5 dollar desktop mic bought at the local Walmart, but there are also groups that try to evoke this primitivity in their songwriting as well, like Bone Awl with its mixing of punk with black metal. And then there are the rare few albums like Wagner Ödegård’s Om undergång och de tretton järtekn, where primitivity is baked into the album’s very core.

The thing that stands out the most for me on this is the odd jangly guitar tone, which is pretty similar to that of Graveland’s Following the Voice of Blood, if maybe a little more distorted on this album. I ended up appreciating said tone quite a bit on the Graveland album, finding that it gave the album a lot of the distinctive pagan feel that made it so unique. The same thing is accomplished here, but Wagner Ödegard/Kumulonimbus also infuses his riffs with a ton of punkish vigor and just the right touch of rawness in the production that inject a ton of dimension and life in the songs. He's also great at writing absolutely infectious riffs; listen to “Myrkrastof” a few times and try telling me that furiously galloping main riff isn’t semi-permanently stuck in your head. The drumming is great too; it never tries to be too flashy or take over the music, but mostly sticks to playing simple punky beats that serve to provide a nice galloping pace for the songs and accentuate the already strong riffs. No point fixing what isn’t broken, after all.

The funny thing about this is that I wouldn’t compare this to much of the pagan black metal I’ve heard; the vibe in this is more reminiscent of Finntroll than, say, Nachtfalke. Unlike a lot of the Nachtfalkes of the world, this makes no attempt to be “epic” or complex; the songs average maybe 2 or 3 minutes, the production is full of rough edges, and everything is stripped down to basics. Each song is just a burst of pure pagan madness, much like how Finntroll’s silly troll songs are a burst of, well, skippy party music, but this is rawer and more organic than Finntroll ever was. There’s also a kind of looseness about these songs that make it sound like it was made by accident; it sounds like the kind of music a hairy Odin-worshiping Swedish caveman priest clad in bearskins who accidentally stumbled upon a guitar and drumset would take upon himself to play in a fit of Odin-given inspiration. Even the lyrics are primitive; they look like the kind of lyrics that a grown man just starting to learn how to speak would write, with all the “z”s and “v”s inappropriately mashed next to other consonants to create weird words like “vp” and “mz”. Apparently these lyrics are written in Old Swedish, so these oddities are commonplace; but to my non-Swedish-speaking-self it looks like said bearskin-donning caveman just wrote down whatever words came to his mind in whatever vaguely matching spelling he could muster up at that moment. It pairs up perfectly with the only-just deranged feel that the album carries.

Wagner Ödegård isn’t afraid to incorporate other elements, either; “Hungerquarn” and “Ragnahljóð” sound like Mr. Ödegard is in the midst of getting high off shrooms in some dank basement, with the weird psychedelic feel of the former evoked by murky guitars and some bizarre whispered vocals, and the latter’s being evoked by a twangy off-tune acoustic instrument playing in the foreground backed by eerie synth and vinyl-esque pops and crackles. While less interesting than the main body of twangy gallopy pagan metal, they do change up the pace a bit and add a lot to the primitive alien feel of the album. “Myrding” is also a more straightforward black metal song that tries to retain some of the pagan feel on the other songs, but the relentless blasting and more downtuned tremolo does end up losing some of the atmosphere as a result. Not to say that it’s a bad song; just that it doesn’t quite match up to the brilliance found in the earlier half of the album. Right afterwards, the album closes out with “Draumr”, a more straightforward, yet still magnificent, ambient piece that sounds like a less icy version of the one in the introduction of Blut aus Nord’s “The Plain of Ida”.

This is spectacular stuff; well-crafted, no-frills rawish caveman-pagan black metal played with an infectious amount of spirit. God, I wish other black metal bands displayed half the vigor that this one does; I want to hear songs to make me want to shout along to them as much as the lines at the end of “Bolwärke” do (and no, I don’t have the slightest inkling of what “Husins torna, stadzsens porta, faghre wet thet törn” is supposed to mean). If you want to only hear the fierce parts in pagan black metal and also hate polish and folk instruments, give Om undergång och de tretton järtekn a listen, and let yourself be swept up by the primitive, near-deranged, galloping assault within.