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Thyrane > Black Harmony > Reviews
Thyrane - Black Harmony

And behold! The layman finds black metal - 90%

Napero, September 30th, 2005

I've never really understood -nor heard enough- black metal. Well, there's newer Dimmu Borgir, which is either entertaining in it's plastic imitation of decadence, or decent passive background music for building things out of Lego with my kids. There's completely useless borderline-BM stuff like Cradle of Filth, which I've unfortunately seen live, and now my soul will carry the stain of goofiness forever. There are the Marduks, Darkthrones, Emperors and their kindred spirits that have been interesting as single album purchases, but have failed to ignite enough interest to stay on my shopping-list any longer than that. But now, suddenly, there's Thyrane. And behold, the layman sees the black light and understands... something?

Before you read any further, please note that this is a review/rant by a completely ignorant black metal idiot, written for others like me, and to be laughed at by those who know better. So, if you are a black metal connoisseur looking for a useful pseudo-scientific dissection of a less-known EP, please don't bother, unless you need a good laugh. Thank you, sir. We may now proceed.

I bought two used Thyrane albums, just because they were there, and because I believe I'm going to see them live during the next six months at a tiny, unknown local festival, where I'm going to spend something like six to ten hours getting progressively more drunk, shooting wildly with my digital camera. One of the two albums, Hypnotic, is quite substanceless semi-industrial poop, and sounds like it quite doesn't even know itself what it wants to be. In the other end, Black Harmony is simply brilliant. Which is very, very surprising, since I believe I was not meant to like black metal. Or more likely, I've never heard any black metal that would keep me interested for longer than a few occasional spins.

This EP seems to have a profound effect on my opinions on black metal, and I'm finally ready to see where it takes me in the long run. The abrasive soundscape and tremolo-picked annoying "riffs" on many downloads from different BM bands' webpages have kept me away from the genre for many reasons. If undergound or garage-level black metal is supposed to sound like someone scraping a blackboard with an empty beer can, or be more repetitive than Tetris, the artists may keep their works, and I'll just stick to death and thrash. I also find the established lyrical, ideological and visual black metal clichés both boring and mildly amusing. The "evil" vocals often sound totally goofy, especially when done by males way too young to have a fully developed voice, or by persons lacking self-respect and/or self-criticism. Corpsepaint was already a tired old joke after the third King Diamond album or so.

Black Harmony is symphonic black metal, which I should have guessed to be the sub-genre that produces the first album I find worth my time. It also intuitively usually means that an abundance of synths is to be expected. But where Dimmu Borgir's works are saturated with, and largely driven by, monk-choir synths, Thyrane takes a different, much more difficult road. The keyboards, while admittedly using the same choir sample sounds, are a suppoting tool, and the main substance comes form the guitars. When Dimmu Borgir creates the melody lines with synths and the guitars mostly support and thicken their sound, Thyrane's melodies are driven by guitars tremolo-picking long, melodic riffs, and the synths mostly stick to the background to increase and deepen the mood.

Yes, there are sort of melodies. There are even hints of vocal melodies. Gasp! Upon learning this the raw black metal puritans stare in horror and turn their backs, losing all appetite, and go back home to download the sound of someone dragging a turned-over shopping-cart behind a Chevy truck on a freeway. This is not by a long shot the rawest, most brutal and grimmest underground black metal. This is symphonic BM, it's just done right this time. The "melodies" are simply exceptionally well written tremolo riffs, played at a high speed, but actually they just make up tiny average-speed melodies, which in my opinion is a requisite characteristic for anything to be "symphonic" in the first place; maybe that constitutes the vague border between anything symphonic and the respective normal stuff. Instead of humongous walls of synths or gargantuan orchestral efforts, symphonic should be defined as something that has an underlying theme of some sort, and only after that a ton of sonic jumble gets added on it. That is the defining characteristic of classical symphonies to an extent. Tshaikovsky's fifth is just an hour of music based on a tiny melody of a few notes, for example. Thyrane is angry and gloomy, however, and with it's abundance of ideas and professional delivery, it conveys the exact atmosphere I believe many others try to achieve by becoming constantly rawer and rawer, until they sound like a jackhammer-bonesaw combo and repeat themselves to death like an old Xerox copier in the dusty corner of a automobile registration office. Thyrane sounds... hellish? And I mean hellish without any forced perversity, but simply by the strength of their music.

As I guess is usual in black metal, the songs are quite long, but instead of repeating themselves like a braindamaged supermarket cashier, the songs have a lot of substance, and avoid becoming boring. Everything is very well done, and despite retaining the black metal vocals and general filing-the-teeth-without-anaesthesia abrasiveness of the sound to a remarkable extent, still manage to sound relatively beefy. Maybe the appeal I feel is partly due to the (lean)meaty thickness of the sound, it somehow hints at some death metal classics, despite not sounding anything like them.

Yup, this is good. On Black Harmony, all the BM clichés are still present, but can conveniently be bypassed by just announcing that the music is good, the rest (corpsepaint, satanism, muddy black and white album covers, etc.) is unimportant. The tired BM imagery has been going on for too long, and I'm happy that there are bands like Akercocke, with new ideas, even in such unimportant areas as how to dress for a gig.

By the way, the tracklisting for the upcoming Thyrane album seems to hint at a possible return of the satanist lyrical base. Maybe that also signals a return to the musical excellence of the earlier works, and abolishment of the detoriated blashphemous primal chaotic unholiness of the industrial infernality of Hypnotic's demonic untr00 decayed travesty...