Review Summary: Dark Age Industrial
I haven’t enjoyed an album like this in years. “Joy” is a thoroughly ironic descriptor, however, for there isn’t a shred of joy anywhere on this album. It’s grim, grim, grim, all the way through.
Most of Acylum’s previous essays in dark abrasion were similar in style. But on
Kampf Dem Verderb (“Fight the Ruin”) they changed things up a bit. For example: They added Dark-Ambient flavors; refined their command of synthetically produced but nonetheless medieval sounding colors and melodies; and added in a bunch of film samples from a single source, the HBO TV Series
Vikings.
When this album came out I was spending time with
The Last Kingdom on Netflix, a similar show depicting The Great Heathen invasion. Even though to my knowledge Kampf Dem Verderb is not an actual concept album, it clicked like one, like a soundtrack to the Western European Dark Ages. It is not the dramatic kind of music we hear in, say, Vikings or Braveheart, which also have soundtracks, but instead a soundtrack with a lot of banging f*cking drums and distortion and ambience that better reflects the Omaha Beach scene in Saving Private Ryan.
THE DARK AGES
Modern academics tend to object to the use of the words “Dark Ages.” They prefer gentler, more dignified names like “Early Middle Ages” or “Late Antiquity.” In my opinion they tend to do this for religious reasons. My own reading is that the era, starting with the collapse of the Western Roman empire and extending to a time slightly after the setting of the Vikings TV show, really was dark. First, it was dark in the most literal sense: There was not as much sun in the north as there was in lower latitudes. A volcano popped off sometime during the early 530’s A.D., leaving the northern part of the world in a volcanic winter. Michael McCormick calls 536 “the worst year to be alive.” As far south as Greece, the cleric Procopius wrote that the sun behaved as if in eclipse. In Scandinavia, the Viking homeland, scholars in the book
Famine in European History wrote that the sun “failed” to shine: “In 536 and 537 ashes darkened the sky, and the summer never came in either year,” with a consequent mortality of possibly 50%. In between Scandinavia and Greece, in the Alps, silver mining ground to a halt for 150 years, presumably because farming what meagre crops could be grown required all hands on deck.
Unsurprisingly, given the post-apocalyptic climate, Western Europe was also “dark” emotionally: The entire place was dominated by warrior cultures. As a member of a Germanic or Celtic tribe, your ancestors had been preyed upon by enslaving Roman legions for centuries. You were forever on high alert because ALL your neighbors were dangerous villains, committed to dominating your food supply, or enslaving you and your family, or both. (Usually both: The Domesday Book, written by the Normans after their conquest of Britain for tax/exploitation purposes, recorded 28,000 slaves throughout Wales, Anglo-Saxon England and the Danelaw).
As a defense, the best strategy to avoid becoming prey was to behave the same way,
preemptively. This created a tit-for-tat aggression cycle that engulfed Europe in almost continuous warfare for centuries, really only taking a break after the descendants of Celts and Romans and Visigoths and Vikings finally almost obliterated themselves in the 1940’s. The seventy-odd years since then has been the longest Western Europe has experienced peace in 2,000+ years of recorded history.
Anyway, this is the kind of stuff I think about when I listen to Kampf Dem Verderb.
THE MUSIC
Track 1: Hunter
The album opens in a quiet but peaceful ambience. The listener is then confronted with a sequence of sounds that pile on, one-by-one, which together imply that some serious sh1t is going down.
The first is a menacing machine-generated warble. If you’re speeding along at 80mph on the highway and the car starts making a noise like that, you should probably consider pulling the f*ck over,
pronto. That’s the sound of a bearing going out, or a wheel about to fall off, or some other catastrophe devolving in the drive train.
Emergency and disaster are the themes of this introduction: An ambulance siren wails, a first-responder yells in panic, a man screams in terror. Over the top sings a soprano choir in a style that, though technically medieval Christian, comes across as deeply sinister.
The introduction implies mayhem, but the music that follows seems more about its aftermath. The lyrics are vague, but I tend to experience it in a medieval context. Medieval, yes, but not the medieval themes used by Rhapsody of Fire and Hammerfall in “Warrior Heart” or “Glory to the Brave,” though there’s some of that on the album too (the following track opens with a Viking named Ivar enlisting warriors: “who will follow me into battle?”). I don’t know exactly what Acylum meant Hunter to be about, but it isn’t about glory or chivalry or “nobility” or any of that sh1t. If it is about anything medieval then it’s about what remains
after the warriors have finished their work. At 2:00, following a bagpipe dirge, a recorder sings out one of the saddest songs I have ever heard. No, not sad. Not even despairing. It is positively
hopeless. A young Visigoth boy stands amidst his burning village, the only survivor of a Vandal raid. His father and brothers hang impaled on the outskirts, his mother and sisters carried off into slavery. “You cry alone” Pedro mourns. Now it’s snowing and -- God help you -- the sons-of-vixen-bitches made off with the winter food stores.
In my personal experience it is music of suffering and bleakness rivalled only by the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s 6th symphony, one of the last things he wrote before he died from what many assume was his suicide.
The following track is faster and aggressive. But what kind of aggression? The predatory kind that drives a raiding party? Or the kind that a person enlists to carry out vengeance?
Tracks 5 and 6
These songs form a pair in my mind similar in concept, though obviously not in style, to Slayer’s “War Ensemble” and Sabaton’s “Screaming Eagles.” The first is the mentality of warriors on the offense: “The sport is war...where victory is a massacre.”
Screaming Eagles is quite different and obviously defensive, its subject being the repulsion of a huge German offensive by a smaller number of Americans during the Battle of the Bulge: “Go to Bastogne,
the crossroads must hold. Stand, alone in the cold.”
Track 5 on Acylum’s album, called “Fire,” feels emotionally if not lyrically (I can’t find the lyrics anywhere) like it depicts the former, offensive mentality. Musically it contains a fascinating piece of melodic distortion -- for lack of a better word -- that seamlessly blends the bassline and higher pitches into a single, mildly Middle Eastern “melody.” Portion Control and Skinny Puppy pioneered such effects, but I’m not convinced they ever did it
better than Acylum does on this track.
Track 6 proceeds like it’s more aggression, but faster. Then a surprise: After 2:45 minutes of rampaging aggrotech, Engel sings --
sings -- a duet with a small child, a duet of amazing tenderness and delicacy. The brief moment totally reframes the song into a defensive aggression, and reminds us that war is as often about fighting to
defend families as it is to exploit them.
A CLASSIC ALBUM?
I cannot recommend to Electro-Industrial fans a listen of this album enough; I could go on like the above for almost every song on the record. (Unless sadistic effects ruin music for you, in which case you better skip it. See below).
If Sputnik called a 5/5 rating “top-shelf” or “totally f*cking awesome” instead of “classic,” I might give it a 5/5. But “classic” implies to me that an album is both nearly perfect and also widely known, at least to fans of the genre. “Top-shelf” doesn’t carry the same semantic baggage. Besides, it's only two years old. Can a two year old album be "classic"?
Anyway, the imperfections on this album are few but important. For starters, the remixes on the deluxe version are as good as any I can think of, but Track 4 of the regular album is a remix of The Enemy that is in my opinion inferior to the original. It also awkwardly breaks up the flow of the album. And it's totally unnecessary -- the original is a masterpiece.
Track 6, despite being a personal favorite, begins with a description of a torture-execution method employed by the Vikings called the Blood Eagle. I understand how it was done, and that’s enough; I don’t want to hear about it every time I listen to the song. Likewise with track 8, which opens with a sample of a gory murder evidently from a German splatter-horror film. This sort of thing is common in the genre of course; similar samples can be found in Velvet Acid Christ and Dawn of Ashes. But while I’m capable of various forms of aggression if necessary -- psychologists type them into predatory, dominance-driven, ideological, and so on -- I don’t have a drop of sadism in me. I grew up a hunter but now rarely go out of my way to kill insects these days, and have zero interest in hearing this stuff. Still, it’s a cool song, so I’ll have to bother to edit it out someday.
ON “DEPRESSING” MUSIC
There’s ample aggression and angst and driving determination on this disc, in line with the emotional profile Acylum established on earlier releases. But it shares a lot of its sadness, melancholy, and nihilism with Goth. An oppressive
bleakness pervades the record, and I forever ask myself when I really get into this kind of thing: Why would anyone
want to listen to this?
An answer is that, except for the sadism -- which is about the ugliest thing in the universe as far as I’m concerned, and really can depress me -- the aesthetically engineered bleakness on this album has the opposite of depressing. As a more or less permanent resident in the Land of Melancholy, I can say that, as ironic as it sounds, the effect of well-made dark music soaked with melancholy is to
reduce it in the listener, at least for a listener of a certain temperament. Any Goth would agree with this statement, if not with its association to Acylum’s music. Listening to the music establishes a connection; I’m not
alone in my misery. It’s nothing personal, and it’s not just my problem -- it’s
everyone's problem, sooner or later. No one gets left out when it comes to our ultimate fates.
And injecting Dark Age history and other Post-Apocalyptic and Dystopian themes into music, as has been done on this album, can add another flavor of “solace”: There existed living conditions in the past that were savagely, horribly miserable; OUTRAGEOUS levels of suffering that make my own issues look trivial.
No one said that we exist to be happy. We just didn’t evolve for it -- we evolved to
survive. And that's really the best we can hope for.
In the meantime? Try to find something cool to listen to.
For anyone who is into reading about Dystopian/Post-Apocalyptic stuff, I recommend:
Why 536 was the worst year to be alive: https://www.science.org/content/article/why-536-was-worst-year-be-alive
Wikipedia article about same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536
Bronze Age Collapse, an earlier dark age, when the major civilizations of the Mediterranean dissolved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
