Review Summary: It ain’t kult and it really ain’t bizarre, but at least it ain’t completely tapt either
On deciding to dip my toes into the current Black Metal scene for the first time this year, I seized on Bizarrekult based mainly on the album art and the hopes that the band might be both bizarre and kult, or at least either one or the other. This proved not to be the case, a fact that I frankly should have expected given the album art is actually about as subtle as as plastering the words “WAR BAD” in calibri font on the cover. Truth is, I’m a sucker for inkblot pictures and I was seduced by the tasteful off-white blankness of the background contrasted with the stark blackness of two stag beetles duking it out. When I realized that the beetles were sporting little cities or castles on their backs, and what that portended, and that their previous album was only a slight deviation from that theme (it’s a moose with a forest on his back, basically the kind of thing that’s a trendy forearm sleeve for tech bros who drive a Subaru), I let out an audible “uh-oh” as I began my foray into what I was sure would be at best a passable attempt at the kind of black metal that tech bros with forearm sleeves and Subarus might listen to in order to appear eclectic and interesting on day-hikes with their hinge dates.
And for the most part, Den Tapte Krigen lives up to those expectations. It’s checking off all the boxes of day-hiker post-black metal, the measured blast-beats, the passable black-metal screeching, the half-time arpeggio-passages with melancholic female vocals, the tremolo buildups, good god the tremolo buildups. Thing is, we’ve all heard everything this band’s done before, and in many places we’ve heard it better. We all know who’s responsible for this, whether what we’re hearing is lifted from Deafheaven or Alcest or Agalloch or even some stomp-clap-hey indie-folk band who hung around long past their expiration date. But lest you think this impression is coming from some ultra-krieg black metal elitist perspective, I found myself pleasantly surprised by how much I kind of enjoyed the thing.
For one, Bizarrekult have a knack for songwriting that belies their blatant biting of their influences. Everything is, if nothing else, timed almost perfectly, the extended blast beat passages, the twinkly interludes, the climactic sprints up Mount Monadnock or wherever. At very few points in the album did I find myself checking to see whether some overextended 16 bar series of arpeggio chords was ever going to end. The fact that there’s very little in the way of self-indulgence or fat that could be trimmed in a genre so rife with these pitfalls isn’t enough to be impressive in itself, but the fact that the segue to a new section of song isn’t bookended by repetitive wank is, at the very least, a relief. And there are moments on Den Tapte Krigen that approach genuine heaviness, clusters of power chords that are at points pointing towards something sludgy, something at least a step or two removed from all the Ecailles de Lune and Bergtatt worship, that speak to at least the potential of the band finding a successful synthesis of their style that goes beyond what is essentially a copy/paste job.
And again, in truth, there’s a lot to at least like about Den Tapte Krigen, as long as you’re not looking for something that’s going to stand out too much in the sea of post-rock influenced black metal bands out there. But within minutes of starting the album, it seems, the band have essentially revealed their full hand, and while it’s not a particularly strong one, it at the very least is able to live up to its influences, even if it at no point seeks to rise above them. And while I don’t drive a Subaru, I wouldn’t be totally adverse to making this the soundtrack to a drive up to my favorite hiking spots. But nor do I see its depth of influence extending much farther than that of a pleasant, if derivative, post-black metal album either.
