Desecrating the Spirit of Life

Somewhere out there, under the dark digital eaves of the internet, or obscured deep in the porch-lit groves of the rustic countryside, there seems to exist a brotherhood of diabolic fiends whose sole purpose is to out-maneuver and out-fuzz one another in the medium of black metal music. How cryptic, callous, and disaffected can the genre get? We've got bands, or individuals out there who make records so bleak and plebeian that De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, Under the Sign of the Black Mark and A Blaze in the Northern Sky sound like Quincy Jones productions by comparison! Remarkably, though, this setback does not necessarily equate to any automatic dismissal, because such cold and uncaring aesthetics are often crucial components to the artist's emotional, or lack of emotional, discharge.

Enter Dodsferd, and the debut Desecrating the Spirit of Life, a rigid example of when and how this technique doesn't seem to function as intended. Now, I'm not going to sugarcoat, a lot of this project's material is mediocre at best. As one of the more prolific Hellenic black metal acts in the past decade, you'd expect more of their throughput to stick, but that just isn't the case. But clearly there is a procession of tweaks and progressions through the Dodsferd catalog, but you can consider Desecrating the Spirit of Life the very twisted root of that body of work, lying dried and dying beneath the soil and in desperate need of some sustenance, whether through rainfall or the blood of some unfortunate to happen by. What's really to fuck up here? You've got your corpse painted poster boy kneeling between candles, inverted cross in the background and the expected black/white newsprint aesthetic, married to a grimy and fuzzy guitar tone, suicidal and misanthropic lyrics, and a sinister rasping specter.

In other words, all the ingredients for Darkthrone. The problem is, they are assembled into the most basal and pedestrian compositions you've likely heard, with alternating, empty melodic tremolo blasts and slow and drowsy sequences of chords affixed to dingy programmed beats, never once culling the interest of the listener in 53 fucking minutes! Seriously, just by accident you'd figure that 53 minutes of guitar would produce something memorable, somewhere, but from the baleful, brooding "Kruzifixion of Human Disgust", to the noisy feedback-inflected flurry of "Doomed in Eternal Solitude", to the high paced ennui of "Fuck Humanity and Celebrate the Destruction of the Masses" with its obvious and overdrawn chorus, there is never any sense of real darkness or disturbance within the songwriting. It's basically like a couple guys plugged in instruments, turned on a tape recorder and improvised the emulation of their favorite bands, with zero quality assurance.

Song titles, packaging, subject matter, all seemingly cut and paste from various other sources and gathered under a Norse moniker. Now, I'm not trying to initiate some hate on for Wrath and Dodsferd. I like a few of the later albums. Hell, if the songs here were in the least bit compelling, I could forgive all of the derision and derivation, or any other flaw present here. but Desecrating the Spirit of Life is an effortless shadow dweller of an album, mimicking aesthetics that have come and gone, come again and gone again, like a milk truck parked outside the home of your neighborhood's hottest mom. I remember reading somewhere about how this band was all about shucking trends and conventions. But there's nothing 'anti-trend' about this, it's the very definition of trend, desecrating the spirit of one of the most intriguing genres in the musical spectrum. Perhaps that's the point of the thing, but it doesn't make for engrossing music, and it's the worst of this band's full-length recordings.

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com

Dodsferd plays a highly rock influenced type of black metal, with an attitude derived from raw black metal, and an arrogance that could quite possibly eclipse anyone else in the scene. The music is generally highly competent, and the latter releases of the band that I have were quite aggressive, as well as being highly melodic.

It’s frequently interesting to go back and get the first release (alright, alright, this is the second) of a band you like and see how they’ve changed. Dodsferd’s changed a fair deal. The riffs are almost always slower, and there’re far more ‘atmospheric’ segments than on later albums. Still, the general feel of the music is generally the same…when it doesn’t fall on its face.

The guitars alternate between far slower passages that can either be single note or tremolo, and are always extremely repetitive in an attempt to create atmosphere, and a slower version of the great, melodic, rock-derived tremolo riffs from before. The drumming isn’t particularly interesting on here, generally either playing a blast beat, in which the hi hat seems way too loud, a fairly bland backbeat during the moodier portions, and a more lively rock beat during some others. The vocals are shrieks, and are fairly low in the mix for the most part. They’re okay, but were far better on latter releases.

The whole thing is pretty good, but it never really approaches the quality of something like Cursing Your Will to Live or Fucking Your Creation. The problem is that the better, more upbeat, riffs, while good, are slowed down quite a bit. I generally prefer slow stuff, but in something like this, it just feels like most of them should be faster. A few slow ones for contrast would be fine, but this is a bit much. It isn’t that much of a deal, I suppose but it doesn’t help the next problem, which is the real killer: the atmospheric parts. They just don’t really work, and serve to mar the energetic mood of the rest of the album.

The songs are all far too long for the amount of ideas that are present. Somehow contrasting this, is a randomness in songwriting and unwillingness to let riffs develop that’s just as prevalent. Let’s take Fuck Humanity & Celebrate the Destruction of the Masses. You get an atmospheric intro, but it’s never developed as the band just jumps ahead. After this is a fairly good, energetic riff, which is quickly cut off, as there’s a vocal break in which Wrath screams out the title. This is followed by a separate tremolo riff in the vein of something like Transylvanian Hunger, and it fails to be all that interesting. This riff is repeated for quite a while, and then a far more interesting one comes in. This quickly fades into the background, as everything just wanders forward.

At this point we’re only halfway through a six-minute song. We’ve had two riffs dominate it, neither of which were that interesting, and everything else used as a transition of some sort. After this, the generic tremolo returns. It has some variations, I’ll admit, but none of them are particularly powerful. We then make the switch to a rockier riff, or what sounds like one from the drumbeat, but no that was just a ruse, everything evens out, and the song decides its content to wallow. You have two riffs that are both monotonous and pretty much carry the song, albeit by dragging it on the floor, and then you have a horde of far more interesting filler riffs that aren’t played enough to become truly interesting, although, admittedly, this is one of the weakest songs on the album.

Really, I can’t make up my mind as to whether I’m looking at this wrong. Perhaps Dodsferd changed their sound after this album, and the bouncier riffs are merely the odds ones out, as opposed to me viewing them as the attraction and everything else as filler. Actually, that’s probably a worse road to go down, because the atmospheric riffs just kind of suck, and in that case, the bouncier riffs just serve to piss all over the mood. Oh, and then the movie samples would just be painful. Actually, they already kind of are. This album has a more serious feel, not in that it’s more serious music, but in that it doesn’t realize how silly it is, and so the horror samples always feel out of place. Besides which, some of them just have no impact to anyone who hasn’t seen the movie in question, a crowd which I’m most certainly a part of. Exclamations like ‘Come on!’ also don’t work with the new mood, and just feel out of place.

Whether I have the right spiritual outlook or not, this simply isn’t that good. It’s okay, but don’t bother with it unless you LOVE everything else that Dodsferd’s done…and are okay with the concept of a really good gymnast who you might otherwise applaud, who shits their pants every once in a while, and falls off the bars to land on the judge’s table.