The wintery, post-festive season is usually a rather quiet and maybe also a depressive time. This year, politics and pestilence are causing plenty of hysteric excitement. If you feel some nostalgia for the good old days of self-absorbed rumination, Karg’s new EP Resilienz might transport you back to these blessed times.
Karg, in case you need reminding, are a long-standing and rather productive Austrian post black metal band whose mastermind is J.J., well-known vocalist of Harakiri for the Sky. Last year the band released Traktat, a 75-minute monster of an album and their greatest commercial success so far. Now, less than a year later, they are back with a new release, an EP titled Resilienz.
Resilienz (which in German means the same as in English, namely to be able to recover quickly from difficulties) has only two tracks, but two substantial ones. The first one, Abbitte, clocks in at almost 15 minutes, the second one, Lorezepam, has a playtime of slightly over 20 minutes.
The soundscapes of Resilienz, though appealing, will offer no great surprises to Karg fans or fans of atmospheric black metal in general – and neither will the EP’s mood. Nevertheless, Karg do present a characteristic blend: firmly rooted in black metal, from the very beginning they have been incorporating other influences into their music, such as shoegaze and post rock, with lyrics in German and an Austrian dialect. Resilienz continues in the same direction. Raw vocals, low in the mix, are well paired with frantic drumming and contrasted with dreamy melodies played out on guitars and keyboards. Everything makes for an intense but not difficult to listen to mixture.
Lyrically, Abbitte (German for a formal request for forgiveness) deals with the pain of looking back on one’s life and regretting some of the choices made. Lorezepam (medication with a calming effect, used to treat anxiety) is about unhappy love, the self-sabotaged kind. Unless you’re a native speaker of Austrian German figuring out the lyrics, although they are available on the band’s bandcamp page, is no easy endeavour. But the band does insist that their lyrics are as important as their music, so, in order to get the whole picture, it’s worth giving it a try.
I liked Resilienz a bit better than Traktat. Though a certain heavy-heartedness is a constant with Karg, I found the new EP less depressive than the last LP. That might be due to the fact that personal suffering simply seems smaller in scope compared to the big global problems of today, or it might be that the character of Resilienz is closer to the accepting melancholy of Romantic art and literature than to the nihilism of black metal.
(7/10 Slavica)
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