Summon the Age of Supremacy

All of this band's attempts at 'secrecy', 'mystery' or 'cult status' aside (I really don't care about a manufactured 'image' in relation to the scene at large), they write some very traditional, very pleasing music, firmly rooted in the grand Norwegian black metal tradition, with obvious references to the Big Three of NBM (Mayhem, Burzum, Darkthrone) all over the place... but really, not done in such a way as to be distracting, or to make you feel like the wool is being pulled over your eyes. With this entire 'backwards looking', nostalgic gestalt coming into play in black metal now (now that all forward momentum has been halted in NBM in the wake of Moonfog's wholesale leave-taking of tradition, and the last Mayhem album) with the work of Nargaroth (yes, postmodern in its self-referential absurdities and winking collusion with the listener in 'building' a tactile nostalgia from remnants of other bands' sounds), it seems to be common these days for BM adherents to completely give up on any kind of progression in their own music, citing the decay of NBM's aesthetics as proof positive that traditionalism is the only way to maintain the BM 'feel' or 'spirit'. Nonsense. However, a group like Godless North, who can assemble an entire project out of different pieces of other bands (they wouldn't be the first, eh?), are really par for the course in today's scene. They are at the forefront of evolution because they stand against every form of stylistic evolution all together. A delicious irony, isn't it?

I don't really care though, because this form of music was excellent when it was first offered to us 7-8 years ago by other bands, and its entire aesthetic/style/scheme of emotional references is still as valid to me as it ever was. Besides, in this age of mass rumor-mongering and the internet's rapid transaction of information (whether grounded in reality or not), one has to create an 'image' before it is created for you. I hail the groups who have the intelligence to recognize this and who manipulate these tendencies of their audience well in advance - if you want to somehow free yourself from this vicious cycle, this kangaroo court of public opinion, you have to block all avenues of capricious 'exploration' of image by the dilettantes in the 'scene', and Godless North have thankfully done this already. Much like Cryptic Winds, they refuse to offer anything to anyone, and information about their status, their motivations or history, has been nailed down before the internet even had a chance to get ahold of them. Of course at this point this kind of 'elite' misanthropic disappearing act is just another image in itself, but, like I was trying to get at above, if one is going to have an image handed to you soiled by the adolescent curiosity of a thousand black metal clones and trend-worshipers, you might as well create a vacuum of information and let their imaginations run away with themselves. Who cares, really? Let's concentrate on the music.

Isolationist, cold, misanthropic black metal is still valid because its powers were never adequately explored - both Burzum and Darkthrone fled its realm before the ground rules could be put down in recordings for future generations, and so that door that was opened (and which few bands have entered even now - Abyssic Hate, maybe, but how many others?) and it remains open, although the aperture seems to be shrinking as time flies by us. Godless North are there, they've heard the master works, they imbibed the chilling essence of 'Transilvanian Hunger' and 'Hvis Lyset Tar Oss' with the rest of us, and somewhere deep inside them the black blood of those releases froze their musical aspirations in just the right direction, pointed North, across the Ocean perhaps, but in such a rictus, a channel of inspiration, that their own life blood now flows upwards towards the past.. toward What Has Come Before, and that is what is being released as they pick up their instruments and lose themselves in the aura of another age - one that, perhaps, never even existed when its originators were trying to put down on tape what was possessing them. Oh well.

The zeitgeist of black metal legitimacy may have fled in horror from Norway, but its language has been left, like a Decalogue, among the ruins, and certain bands still have the inner fortitude (sorry, I couldn't resist that) to pick up the runes and start all over again. Godless North play a timeless, beautiful form of hate-filled, simplistic, darker-than-black metal, and I, for one, while hoping I am aware of all the strange maneuverings of stylistic affiliations and convictions going on behind the scenes, can not but love this kind of aural exploration because I loved it in its original form, and I, like the musicians in this band, am still possessed by the spirit of that time in music. May it never be otherwise. The production, guitar sound...everything on this work just screams out 'nostalgia', and that's fine. For those of you who mainly look towards the past when considering listening to black metal, you can't do much better than this album.

Excellent, bracing, violent, excoriating, soul-pleasing music.

UA

Erebus Magazine
http://erebuszine.blogspot.com

It's very, very difficult for me to imagine a black metal album more firmly mediocre and generic than this one, and I own the Kythrone full-length. I can't imagine what the purpose of this album is; it's the epitome of some guys getting together and arbitrarily deciding to make a black metal album and understanding how to do it mechanically but not how to make it even remotely interesting to the listener. It walks and talks and acts like a black metal album in all ways, but it conveys none of the emotion, intensity, or atmosphere that a black metal album should. It manages to be exactly like black metal without having any of the important elements.

Drumming and vocals on this release are absolutely plain and not worth any discussion, so I'll skip directly to the riffs, what typically causes the success or failure of a black metal album. They're riffs, and that's the only thing I can say about them. They come as either mindless and random configurations of tremolo notes or incredibly generic and overused black metal melodies, and in this case the latter is actually better because it's listenable despite how derivative it is. The incredibly cheap and weak guitar tone exacerbates just how childish and irrelevant the riffs tend to be; even the band itself sounds unconvinced of its own music, and I can practically imagine the guitarist while recording suddenly realizing halfway through recording a track that he has no idea why the fuck he wrote what he did.

This music doesn't have any atmosphere to speak of, and the production manages to be raw without being abrasive, but by far the biggest offense this album manages to claim is absolute lack of riffcraft. Much like Kythrone, Godless North is forced to employ incredibly mediocre riffs in situations that call for solid ones, making for vaguely embarrassing, inappropriate music. Did I mention that every track is three minutes longer than it needs to be? The songs have maybe three riffs each, and each one of those riffs gets pounded into absolute dust by the end of the song, not that they were worth the pounding to begin with. It's very difficult to write about an album like this, because if you've heard any other black metal album, you've heard more than the sum total of the ideas on this one.

'Summon The Age Of Supremacy' doesn't really offend me on a musical level, but the absolute laziness of the whole production manages to annoy the crap out of me. What's the point of releasing an album like this? Unlike, say, Dark Funeral, where the band is playing derivative and plain but undeniably impassioned and savage music, Godless North doesn't even seem to give a shit about their own music, as if they decided to write a black metal album because they had time to kill. This is stupid, inelegant, boring music and I don't recommend it to anyone.