Tohcoth

Aarni's 'Tohcoth' is an arduous fucking slog of an album which is primarily known as 'Bathos'' crushingly disappointing follow-up, almost half a decade in the making and displaying very well that the time was used poorly. Now, I agree with the general sentiment of the doom scene that 'Tohcoth' is fucking horrible, but I don't agree that this comes as a surprise. 'Bathos' was a very good album but it teetered on the edge of shit throughout its course due to its twee sensibilities and self-congratulatory infatuation with being weird for the sake of weirdness. It actually managed to walk the tightrope, but 'Tohcoth' falls off inside of thirty seconds and splatters itself on the floor in front of the circus' horrified onlookers. Mothers, shield your children's eyes to this motherfucker.

One of the most egregious flaws of this album is that at over seventy minutes this is fucking agonizing to sit through, especially when you consider how little actually happens in it. Calling this a 'metal album' is something of a stretch; it's more like an experimental rock album with some weird doom influences sometimes. This, as usual, isn't necessarily a bad thing, but metal musicians making rock music rarely goes well, and 'Tohcoth' is a perfect example. It's pretty telling that the intro track, 'Coniuratio Sadoquae' appears to have way more effort put into it than any of the 'real' songs; this is a theme that continues throughout the album. Whenever Master Warjomaa paints himself into a melodic or structural corner, he doesn't do something creative to break out of it, he just kinds of stammers and hems and haws his way through the inconvenience until you eventually forget where you came from. Remember that episode of 'The Office' where Michael claims to have a surprise waiting for the employees and when confronted about it proceeds to obviously and awkwardly stall for time while everyone files past him? This is the musical version of that.

'The Sound Of One I Opening' is the best example of the album as a whole: it goes absolutely fucking nowhere in its nine minutes of excruciating, aimless noodling. Yes, there's a lot of different stuff going on between the guitar and bass, but none of it means anything or progresses to any sort of logical point. This is not 'experimental' or 'progressive' or even 'chaotic', it's just poorly constructed. What makes this even more painful is that there are small flickers of brilliance in certain melodies on random tracks that are immediately crushed under the weight of the album's meandering, slothlike jackoff session. The core of this music seems lifted from '70s psych rock, so why does this feel so painfully dry and uninteresting? Well, the production doesn't help: it's as flat and lifeless as possible, with absolutely no auditory richness or space to sink your teeth into. Really though, that's the least offensive part of 'Tohcoth'.

The entirety of 'Tohcoth' is composed of random little bits and pieces of music that seem to be there to please only the musician behind them, not the listener. This would be an admirable feature if the album didn't happen to be completely fucking terrible. Enormous tracks of overly quirky clean guitar lines, very suspect drum programming, and overwrought, faux-ironic clean vocals really don't lead me to think that this was a 'serious' album or even one composed with the intent of being listenable. 'Tohcoth' is a fucking endurance test, not an album to be listened to for the sake of enjoyment.

'Tohcoth' sucks, 'Bathos' is good, just get that one and pretend this doesn't exist.

It wouldn't be a stretch at all to call Aarni a pretensious band, at least on their sophomore album 'Tohcoth'. You don't even have to listen to the music to realise this, the booklet is full to the brim with tell-tale signs of an overly ambitious band. The band credits Opeth, Nest, Aghora, Camel, Can Der Graaf Generator, King Crimson, Kayo Dot and (of course) Black Sabbath as inspiration, aswell as an eclectic mix of non-musical influences such as Nietzsche, Terry Pratchett, Giger, Dali, David Lynch and Monty Python, among many others. The artwork seems concerned with Cthulu-like creatures and esoteric symbology (possibly made up by the band), interspersed with quotes from Dr. John Dee and cartoony pictures of the band too bizarre for words to describe. Aarni either want to prove that they're very artistic or very weird.

So you can imagine my surprise when this didn't sound anything like Orthrelm or Maudlin of the Well or any other bands known for being ridiculously pretensious. Infact, the music itself isn't even that overly weird, nor does it have lots of stupid "avant garde" decoration to make relatively normal songs seem like visionary masterpieces. Don't get me wrong, it isn't exactly a normal doom metal album, and I'll get to all the experimental ideas the band has in a moment, but I'd like to make clear that the image of this band is no indication of the band's music.

It's easy to call this doom, as that's the way the riffs seem to be written, although there isn't much low tuning here at all, the mid-frequencies fill up most of the sound space. This isn't really that slow either, most of the music here is midpaced. But the riffs have a definate apocalyptic doom feel, with a bit of a folk twist, although there's a lot of acoustic strumming on here too. The vocals range from a standard male singing voice to a (much more prominant) sort of murmured spoken voice. The whole album isn't very coherent and there are a lot of weird ideas thrown in all over the place, seemingly for no reason at all. Some ocean sounds here, a weird electric synth melody there, a random Dead Raven Choir-esque jam here and so on. However, this actually improves the album rather than detract from it, because where the songwriting fails (for the most part the songwriting is engaging although it's not without it's weaknesses) the random ideas stop things from getting boring.

Still, 'Tohcoth' is far from perfect and is too inconsistant to warrant regular plays, but it's enjoyable music to have on in the background and as much as it seems like the band tried to fuck things up for themselves I can't really fault this, it doesn't really get boring at any points and is enjoyable to play in the background whilst studying or playing video games. Yeah, one of those albums. I haven't a clue who I'd recommend this to, but if you want an enjoyable metal album with a lot of interesting ideas and you don't get annoyed by excessive pretension, then pick this one up, you shouldn't be disappointed.

Aarni is the project of one Markus Marjomaa or Master Warjomaa as he calls himself. The project started in 1988 and Tohcoth is the second album from him under the Aarni banner. The man is also involved in doom band Umbra Nihil but Aarni is basically his solo project.

The album starts with a drone like intro before launching in to the first proper song The Hieroglyph with a slow mournful doom metal riff that’s typical of most melodic European doom. That is, till the folk melody comes along to inject some life into the mournful nature of this music. The pattern is basically the same for the first four songs on Tohcoth. The songs are slow paced mournful doom metal anthems with the occasional chuggy riff and the odd folk melody with some of the flattest singing I’ve ever heard. Of these it’s Arouse Coiled Splendor that really stands out with a memorable guitar line and melody that manages to get inside your head.

While the album has that undeniable DIY bedroom-project stamp to it right through the eleven songs on offer, it’s from the title song onwards that things start to get really weird. There’s a feeling of Mr. Bungle that comes in simply because Master refuses to stick to one songwriting idea or style. The music is still doom metal with folk influences but there’s a lot of different stuff happening. All Along the Watchtowers starts with a quasi Thin Lizzy riff before going off into this chanting refrain and almost Skepticism type pace. Chapel Perilous is another schizophrenic beast that starts off with clean guitars and a pretty melody before going off into the kind of guitar madness that you’d find on a The Locust album albeit all done at the traditional doom pace.

The weirdness in Aarni is undeniable and there must have been a whole barrowful of drugs consumed to make music as fucked up as this but it’s the combination of the slow mournful pace and enough room in the songs for individual parts to stick out that make Tohcoth quite an interesting listen. Aarni also remind me a good deal of Nightstick in spirit and in their refusal to follow any sort of rules or boundaries in their song writing.

Ultimately though, I get the feeling that some of it is just weird for weird’s sake. The music on offer is schizophrenic enough to appeal to followers of Mike Patton’s Ipecac label while being doom enough to sit quite comfortably with the Southern Lord roster. That being said, Tohcoth is more an interesting oddity than a doom metal necessity.

Originally written for http://www.kvltsite.com

It’s tough to review any Aarni album as a cohesive whole, because basically every song sounds different to every other song, and this is true of the latest effort from this Finnish one-man band. Unfortunately, while this is just one of the reasons why previous full-length Bathos is so brilliant, it doesn’t really work nearly as well here.

It’s clear even before pressing play on your stereo that this is going to be an exploration of the bizarre. The quirky cover art, the strange song titles, the rather surprising claim that “all responsibility is hereby transferred to the listener”, and the picture on the disc itself—a rather feminine-looking Cthulhu-like figure wearing red high heels spreads its buttocks for the buyer, the location of the disc’s hole making picking the thing up distinctly disquieting—all of these factors serve to suggest that this is to be no run-of-the-mill experience.

And indeed, this proves to be the case. Although the opening track is a relatively unremarkable clean electric guitar-based exercise in mood-setting, and the first song proper is a fairly straightforward doom piece, albeit with Aarni’s trademark flutes and some strange time signatures, the album as a whole feels like an exercise in being as strange as possible at all times. Take, for example, the song Λογος, which starts out as a rather pleasant piece, based around clean guitars, synths, and clean male (guest) vocals. It’s nothing too shocking, but it’s a fairly pretty listen, until it suddenly cuts into a weird atmospheric section based on electronic drones and noise, with some deep chanting. This new theme is very cool in its own right, with some spacey synths joining later, but it doesn’t feel like it belongs on the same album, let alone in the same song.

It is this tendency towards jarring transitions that is one of the album’s weakest points. Although most of the parts, taken individually, are fairly good to excellent, the manner in which they are juxtaposed often makes it feel like the artist was either haphazardly sticking sections together, or else simply being weird just for its own sake. The result is a patchwork of musical ideas, strung together somewhat amorphously. There is no cohesion not only to the album, but even to the individual songs. People complain about Opeth doing this, but really Aarni is orders of magnitude worse.

Still, despite this fairly key complaint, the release does have its share of great moments. The instrumental track called Riding Down the Miskatonic on a Dead Thing, for example, consists of a number of rather excellent musical sections, ranging from the light and airy to rather crushing sections of doom metal. Although they are strung together a little randomly, the track is a very strong one. The musicianship is good for the most part, in particular the bass which produces some very exciting lines, as for example in the chaotic jams of The Sound of One I Opening. It’s a little sloppy in places, due to the refusal of “M. Warjomaa” to nitpick and retake errors. However if this is accepted, it’s no worse than listening to, say, Burzum, although the music is technically more complex and hence more mistakes are discernable. A lot of it sounds more like a loose jam than a highly-polished studio album, but this isn’t necessarily such a bad thing.

Another standout piece is The Sound of One I Opening, which is a fairly humorously-delivered attack on Abrahamic religion. It’s delivered as a fairly middle-Eastern sounding piece with long, improvisational-sounding instrumental sections. Some of the album’s best lines are contained within, for example “We should believe a Jew girl was fucked by a dove who was really God in disguise… and that half-bird, half-Jew schmuck somehow still spies on us”. A pitch-shifted vocal section near the end adds a new flavour, but it’s not pitch-shifted in the sense that goregrind bands’ vocals tend to be. Instead he appears to have sung the lines in a monotone, and then used pitch-shifting effects to add melody. It’s strange, but it works. A similar technique is later used in the piece Barbelith, where it produces some of my favourite vocals on the release.

Speaking of vocals, however, they are pretty atrocious. They are mainly clean, with some snarls here and there. They are sung in a fairly deep tone—think of Squaring the Circle from the Bathos album—but rarely on-key. Frequently the melody goes too low for him to sing comfortably and he winds up producing a toneless aberration. Although it’s often just something you can get used to, it is really obnoxious sometimes, more or less ruining Arouse Coiled Splendour which would be a fairly good song otherwise, and hurting the thoroughly gloomy atmosphere of All Along The Watchtowers (which is not a Bob Dylan cover, but does open with that song’s chord progression before turning into the cloyingly dark piece it truly is). There is also one other notable vocal style which is only used on The Battle Hymn of the Eristocracy—a piece set to the tune of John Brown’s Body, with lyrics about Discordianism—which is a high falsetto. It’s also pretty weak and amateurish-sounding, but the vocals on this song actually work in a strange kind of way.

So to summarise, this album is filled with sections of great music, but ultimately falls flat due to the haphazard way in which they are put together, the over-the-top strangeness, and the woeful vocals. I wasn’t at all amused the first time I listened to it, but it actually did grow on me significantly, to the extent that I do enjoy it quite a bit. Indeed if I were to rate on enjoyment alone, I would probably award something in the high seventies or low eighties. However, the glaring faults do spoil it somewhat, and I can’t give it that high a score. It is a grower, and many of the faults can be accepted with time, but I wouldn’t recommend this release, save to fan of very bizarre and avant-garde music, or big fans of his previous work.