It’s not every day you come across a black metal band quite like Altari – or even just a band for that matter. Presented as a straight black metal outfit, there’s a lot more to this album, not least a tangled web of influences here (including the likes of Interpol, Killing Joke and Blue Öyster Cult) that are anything but. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but more about that later.
Named after a lengthy series of volcanic eruptions that took place in Iceland between 1975 and 1984, Kröflueldar (“Fires of Krafla”) also took nearly nine years to reach us, and I feel like I’ve spent a fair bit of that again getting to know this album. Spoiler alert: it’s a grower (the final score is at least double what I was going to give it on first listen), and it may not be quite what you expect on multiple levels. And I’m still not sure quite what I did expect beyond “black metal of some description”, just that it wasn’t quite this. I’ve listened to enough black metal in my time to be fairly comfortable with what I expect from the genre, and while a lot of the classic hallmarks are present on Kröflueldar, there’s also an awful lot that leaves me (mostly metaphorically) scratching my head a little bit.
The production, for instance, is every bit as lo-fi and fuzzy as you’d expect, and you’ve got layers of suitably bleak, grinding soundscape seething in the background, and some of the song titles would be perfectly at home on something shat out of Norway in the early 90s (Djáknahrollur – “deacon shivers”). But then you’ve got unexpectedly clean guitars, a remarkable amount of groove, and vocals that mostly don’t sound like the last guttural raspings of souls condemned to eternal torment. So what gives?
The only way I can adequately describe this is if you think about the genre of an album as being like the basic outer frame of a house, with the décor and contents representing the instrumentation, lyrical content and so on that goes on under the skin as it were. If you apply that to straight black metal albums, they tend to be icy bleak blackness all the way in; they look like a black metal album from the outside, and the inside matches. My personal favourite in this vein is A Blaze in the Northern Sky, but you can substitute your own here: the analogy works regardless, as long as it’s really grim black metal. So, if A Blaze in the Northern Sky is a wretched, godforsaken shack in a frozen wasteland, and more of the same inside (albeit with a bit of death metal lurking in the attic), Kröflueldar is much the same shack from the outside, although maybe on the edges of a suitably desolate volcanic field (it is Icelandic, after all), only with a multi-genre festival in full swing just behind the door. It has the bare bones of a black metal album, but there’s all manner of things going on inside, very few of them black metal in anything but name.
Take the guitars for example: for all the black metal wrapping, Kröflueldar is full of pretty straightforward heavy rock guitars, with no small amount of prog influence on display, which fits with the influences I mentioned at the beginning. The basslines and overall rhythm aren’t quite what you expect either, with lively, sprawling beats that are entirely too upbeat for black metal in the traditional sense. If Killing Joke are to be found anywhere on this album, it’s here. And then there’s the vocals, which fluctuate between the listless, wraithlike vocals on Sýrulúður, and the growly, almost death metal vocals on Kröflueldar, Djáknahrollur and others.
The more I listen to this album, the more I feel like Altari have bypassed traditional black metal and gone straight to what I think is the most interesting phase of bands that start out as black metal: the point at which they bow out of the “grimmer than thou” game, and start making the music they really want to make. Darkthrone and their voyages into crust punk are the most famous example, closely followed by Satyricon and whatever you want to call the black ‘n’ roll/groove hybrid they’ve been playing with for the last 20ish years. Even Alcest did it at one point, with the much (and unfairly) maligned Shelter.
Of the three, the Satyricon comparison is probably the most useful. One thing that keeps jumping out at me about Kröflueldar is that there’s just entirely too much of a groove pulsing away under most of this album for the black metal label to fit comfortably. In fact the first couple of tracks, the growly, relatively clean vocals combine with that groove to basically replicate the sort of “alternative” groove metal that was a Thing in the early/mid 2000s. Those of you who remember the likes of Panic Cell in particular, are likely to have a few flashbacks early on in this album. And just when you’ve got your head around that unlikely musical touchstone popping up on a black metal album, Altari jump out at you from around a particularly Satyriconesque corner and throw Leðurblökufjandinn at you, which wouldn’t sound out of place on The Shadowthrone. Sýrulúður takes you hurtling round another musical hairpin turn, with aforementioned ethereal vocals over a slightly unsettling background hum, that melds with buzzy, droning guitars to create something that should be fairly straightforward black metal on paper, and yet is somehow no such thing. Hin eina sanna is very early Darkthrone, combined with enough groove and clean guitar work to avoid sounding derivative, and Vítisvilltur plays with a lighter, less densely packed sound and harsh vocals, that sounds not unlike Amesoeurs – it could lurch into Gas in Veins at any moment and I wouldn’t be surprised or upset. The closer, Grafarþögn is – somewhat ironically at this point – about as close to traditional black as Kröflueldar gets, and I don’t quite know how I feel about it. Altari’s take on the genre as we know and love it is superb, intermingling delicate post melodies with rasping, despairing howls. However, much as it took me a while to appreciate the disparate elements of the rest of this album when I first listened to Kröflueldar, I find myself missing them in this final track.
Ultimately though: is it black metal? Yes, but also no. And not as we know it either way. Do I care? Also no. In the same way that I still love Satyricon and Darkthrone dearly, regardless of how long it’s been since either of them produced a “proper” black metal album: I don’t really give a fuck if it’s black metal or not (although it probably shouldn’t be advertised as such), it’s actually pretty cool, and I’m keeping it.
(9/10 Ellie)
Leave a Reply