Ygg

How fitting that Eastern Europe proved to be one of the few holdouts for quality black metal just as the more world-renowned scenes began to decline at the turn of the century. In the last twenty plus years artists from Poland, Ukraine, Romania, and of course Russia were all releasing work that challenged the maturity of their Scandinavian and Greek elders. There’s a special sense of mysticism that characterizes this style, cold and vast music, imposing yet not in the abrasive manner of the French or the unabashed rawness of the Norwegian. The fact that there has been little in the way of revivalist material of late that attempts to ape these traits is perhaps testament to its uniqueness in time and place.

Ukraine’s Ygg follow in the footsteps of the Burzum school defined by the likes of Drudkh, Hate Forest, and Walknut. Formed of members from Nokturnal Mortum and Khors – two artists sat more on the folky side of the coin to these bleak soundscapes – their debut self-titled album released in 2011 is mammoth work of trancelike, repetitive black metal euphoria that exists for no other purpose than the reverence of the natural landscapes and all the rich history and culture contained within them.

The setup is relatively simple. The production is not distractingly lo-fi or obnoxiously orchestrated, but delivered with a degree of cinematic polish as to give it motion and life in spite of the relative simplicity of these compositions. Because the tempo is kept slow by black metal standards – somewhere in the region of 150bpm – the drums play a key role in driving the music forward and giving it momentum. Crafted from near constant double bass and galloping rhythms, with blast-beats kept to a minimum, fills cascade out of the mix, crashing down on the listeners or threatening to dissolve in off-kilter shuffles before pulling the tight rhythms back from the brink. With all that in mind, only modest reverb is required, particularly on the toms, to give those lengthy fills a sense of size and power, like distant thunder claps over the horizon.

Guitars are a wash of layered tremolo riffs crafted from the simplest of ascending and descending chord progressions. Although cyclical in nature, there is a lag on the resolution of each passage which – when compounded on one another atop the repetitive drum patterns – gives each piece a sense of existing outside of time. It warps the listener’s perception of the temporal, the music feels as if it was always there, even before hitting play, and will endure long after we’ve turned the stereo off. The bass is audible beneath this wash of cold melodic noise, grounding the celestial nature of the guitars with a pulsing tension that is felt more than heard.

Modest keyboards are deployed as additional harmonic material for riffs at key junctures. These are kept subtle so as to be fully integrated into the rich aesthetics already present on these arrangements, enhancing, not distracting. There are also small hints of folk music contained within this hours’ worth of material. A mouth-harp here, a jaunty rhythmic flourish there. It’s as if the pieces themselves, despite being dedicated to the landscapes of Ukraine, are also paying small homage to the people and cultures that have lived within them over millennia. All this culminates in a work of unmistakably Eastern European black metal, at once minimal and oddly limiting if one analyses the musical qualities alone, but in the delivery and aesthetic applied it becomes addictively compelling.

‘Ygg’ bounds through the wilderness, acknowledging the fragility and swiftness of life, yet approaching the world with a sense of the heroic regardless. It is a strong example of a very distinctive style of black metal from a specific corner of the globe. One that is little imitated (at least not well), and manages to surpass its own undeniable simplicity, transcending the bounds of genre in the process, crafting meaning that echoes through the eons.

Originally published at Hate Meditations