YOUR AVERAGE PORTLAND black-metal fan of drinking age would
have to agree that last October’s intimate Watain show at Rotture was
one of the year’s most vivid gigs. The Swedish vanguards arrived with
corpse paint and satanic conviction, leading the crowd down a candlelit
path of eviscerating nihilism. “Sworn to the Dark” grew from title to
chorus to chant, weaponizing the militant song-march, while the lyrics
see the superman narrator “pounding now through flesh and bone, like a
hammer through a child.” It felt like holy war igniting. But the next
day, Watain’s music just felt empty.
On paper, Olympia’s Wolves in the Throne Room might seem as narrow
as Watain. The Americans play black metal overtly influenced by the
music of Burzum, the one-man Norwegian band conceived by convicted
murderer and arsonist Varg Vikernes. It’s music of stripped primal
howls, occult shrieks, and raw atmosphere—a possessed man’s punk
rock. On WITTR’s new full-length, Black Cascade, rugged picking and
organic, lumbering drums meet progressive-rock duration. Folkloric
storylines are punctuated by psychedelic double-vision vocal hiss. The
album is a bar-raising black-metal haunt—not
child-hammering—and to place WITTR in the wolf’s lair of
right-wing black metal would be a mistake, says drummer Aaron
Weaver.
“I think we’re the only band who is working within the black-metal
arena who has specifically and explicitly said we’re against the very
idea of racism or adamantly opposed to the notion of militaristic
fascism.” Not that he is saying what WITTR are for. Theirs is a world
without lyric sheets, a world where recording and touring are personal
conduits into altered consciousness. “The goal of playing this music
is… to achieve some sort of transcendent state,” he offers, “and
through achieving that transcendent state, we are able to touch some
sort of transcendent awareness or receive access to some sort of
transcendent wisdom.”
Long ago, Burzum reached for “other planes” in the song “Lost
Wisdom” but couldn’t touch them. There’s a lesson in here
somewhere.