Towards the end of last year, I found myself reviewing what was easily the strangest album (I use the term loosely, quite frankly) I’ve encountered in many a long year. It wasn’t an album in the traditional sense, but rather an aural recreation of Mayan death rites, based on material found in the sacred Mayan text, the Popul Vuh. Given my penchant for the weirder end of metal, plus an existing interest in the ancient cultures of the Americas, I was never not going to end up reviewing this particular oddity, but it did rather take me by surprise just how much I ended up getting into it. It was a late (and unexpected) entrant into my Album of the Year list, no less. So, when I found out a little while ago that Ershetu’s second album was coming out this month, I was all over it to put it mildly. This time, rather than Mayan death rites, they’re exploring death in the Japanese Shinto tradition, and what better way to spend the post-festival blues period (Damnation, first weekend in November), than some quality time with some good old death rites and rituals?
Now the first thing to note is that – somewhat fittingly for a band as openly and deliberately confounding as Ershetu – this album immediately threw me for a loop, because I came into it with certain expectations based on its predecessor, Xibalba. Which is my mistake really – I should know better at this point than to expect standard levels of consistency and continuity from a band that spent their debut literally recreating Mayan death rites.
On the subject of changes since Xibalba, there’s been a lineup change in that Lazare (Lars Are Nedland) has moved on, and Vindsval is now in charge of vocals. This will either mean nothing or everything to you, depending on how Lars-shaped your interest in Ershetu was to begin with. Also, they’re not lurking in the ancient hinterlands of Mesoamerica any more, having done a flit of some ten thousand or so miles, and landed in Japan.
The other major change, and the one that threw me for a loop when I first started listening to Yomi is that where previously the metal album aspect very much took a back seat to the immersive, recreation aspect, this time the two are a lot more equally balanced. Parts of Yomi are every bit as atmospheric and evocative as Xibalba was, but then other parts are essentially a fairly straightforward black metal album, albeit with a very distinctive sound, and more influences swirling about than you can shake a stick at.
All of which begins to make sense when you look at how Ershetu themselves describe this album, its inspiration, and the ways in which they’ve used that inspiration. The central concept here is that of the Japanese Shinto kami, the beings and phenomena that are venerated in the Shinto religion. They can be deities, spirits, forces of nature, parts of the landscape, ancestors, and any number of other things. Like so many things in life, kami are not inherently good or bad, but possess characteristics of both, and this duality is an integral part of the album. Certainly compared to the rites and beliefs recounted in Xibalba, Shinto has a far more nebulous and nuanced concept of death cycles, opposing forces, dark and light, and divine beings all to be considered, so there was always going to be a lot more to this album than the last one, but building the aforementioned opposing forces into the structure of the album itself is taking it to a level I wasn’t expecting.
The opposing forces here – on a musical level – are, according to Ershetu: “ritual percussion, orchestration and atmospherics – including tones derived from the Koto, Shamisen and other traditional musical instruments of Japan – meet full-throttle and cerebral Black Metal power”. So essentially it’s part Xibalba-esque evocative escapism, part black metal on a grand, epic scale.
All of which is a pretty accurate summary of what’s going on here. The “atmospherics” (bonus points for the innovative noun form) are woven throughout the album, playing off the black metal thread that is their direct counterpart. Both have their moments in the foreground, both have their moments skulking at the margins, and both work together remarkably well, including the parts of the album where they directly interact with each other.
Now, I’m not going to pretend I know anywhere near enough (or anything really) about traditional Japanese music and instruments to comment on the accuracy of the atmospherics side of Yomi, but I will say that it’s very well done, remarkably earwormy in places, and does indeed take you places if you pay enough attention to it for it to do so. The black metal, on the other hand, is far more my usual territory and, well, it is indeed black metal, but of a very specific flavour, that I’m actually struggling to put my finger on with any precision. Full-throttle and cerebral also translates to dramatic, richly textured, and fairly bombastic black metal, of a sort that keeps reminding me of early Cradle and the more melodramatic end of second wave, although I’m not at all convinced Ershetu would take the former comparison as a compliment.
Beyond that, there are all manner of influences and resemblances whirling around here, to the point that it’s almost like a musical Rorschach test; I suspect most people will find different things in here, depending on their own tastes and preferences. I personally hear any number of bands in the more gothic, extreme or experimental end of black metal, some broad strokes of post-black in places (Les Discrets springs to mind in Abikyōkan), and some earwormy passages of traditional Japanese instrumentation that sound like All Is One-era Orphaned Land of all things. They shouldn’t, but they absolutely do.
And talking of “shouldn’t, but absolutely does”, the whole album falls into this really. It’s a dense, swirling confection of evocative atmospherics that conjure images of rite and ritual, interwoven with the sort of multi-layered, complex black metal that people either love or hate, and it does all of the above with a frankly disarming number of hooks and earwormy riffs in the mix. Shouldn’t work, but absolutely does. Personally, I’d prefer more focus on the recreating and evocation side of things, but maybe that’s just where Ershetu are going now they’ve had a lineup change. And I can’t honestly say I dislike the straight black metal side of Yomi either, I just find myself wanting both – an aural recreation album, and a full album of the “full-throttle and cerebral black metal”. But then I also don’t dislike how the two are woven together throughout the album.
I don’t know, I just want more of the whole thing in general, whatever form it takes.
(8.5/10 Ellie)
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