I remember as if it was yesterday the first time I heard a 'black metal' song. That hypnotic opening riff, the sound with a quality I never heard of before - it reminded what struck me the first time I heard Black Sabbath and System of a Down. It reminded me of what pulsated through my mind and body. Blood.
That song was 'War', by Burzum. It sounds like a demo tape, for sure - it even has an improvised solo by the one who would take Varg Vikernes to jail. Even so, I did not know the title or the artist it belonged. For some three months I listened to it when the sun would creepily shone its last rays unto the day. Usually, it was accompanied by the sound of slashing blades and ghastly scream from soon-to-be dead men in Mount & Blade (which will be feature in another post). Before this unknown song, the battle cries were usually background noise for by System of a Down's tunes. This was a little more than a decade ago.
One day I posted the song in one of the forums I used to visit (not the entire song, just the intro - thanks Audacity!), and a veteran laughed at me, saying it was called 'War', and that the musician behind this project was a lunatic Norwegian, who burned churches, killed people, yadda yadda yadda. He linked me to an old band of Varg, Mayhem.
This song is when I really felt sure of what it was. The pounding, the flowing blood, the feeling that my soul was pouring out of my brain. Soon after this (thanks to Limewire) I had Filosofem and De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas in my HDD, and I played them a few times every single day throughout some years.
Of course, at that point, it was just a feeling. You know how teenagers are. They think they got it, they think they know it all. I felt alone in a dark corner inside a bright room, while everyone else had light shining upon them. From Burzum and Mayhem, I explored everything the metal sub-genres had to offer - at one time, I was listening a new 'brutal technical death metal' album a day, just so I could review it on Twitter. Now I look back, and see it was a kind of wasted time. Those artists never did anything to me; they were all bland, soulless copies of each other, trying to outdo themselves day after day in a meaningless competition. The only other thing that hit me as Black Metal did was Doom Metal, even if in a lesser way.
Nevertheless, what is my point here, you might be asking? What does my personal musical journey has to do with anything? First, I would like to define what I mean when I say "Black Metal". It is not just the sound and aesthetics; it is the soul of it, the meaning of it all. The heavy heart and burdened soul penned such works. It does not matter the quality of the recording - sometimes it helps to have the raw, gritty sound. This article is not about "commercial Black Metal" or the genre itself, it is about a deeper, nonexistent scene of soul brothers across the world, and sometimes the sound isn't as 'Black Metal' as one might think - and the atmosphere is pretty easy to invoke. There is more than that. Black Metal is state of mind, a readiness of the soul. It's a door that can't be manually unlocked. It is a call, just like the Call of the Wild. If you are not ready for it, you will never be. However, once you are 'in', suddenly you will connect and understand people that, before, were unreachable. If you are feeling trapped in a void, it will not matter anymore.
The emptiness of post-modern life, the useless polarization and mass-control are subduing young people's heart, turning them into soulless husks that need to feed on attention, not on meaning. No more do teenagers want to be the pure, chaste fair maiden, nor do they want to be the honest, dependable knight. It is a worthless dream in current society. Black Metal is the rebellion against that - it is the chant, the waves that tries to batter down an ugly wall. That is why gritty, raw and lo-fi are a plus - it is a rebellion against what has been deemed 'beautiful', the bastardisation and prostitution of the pure and meaningful, into a cookie-cutter trash. There are expressions of this rebellion, but, in music, it is Black Metal.
Such is the Call of Black Metal. It can be heard in a droning sound of synthesizer, in the growling distorted guitars, or even in the sagas of old being chanted once again.
