The Isolationist

To identify the truly distinguishing features of black metal one must ask where it situates the listener. Specifically, the fact that they are expected to temporarily divorce themselves from their immediate surroundings – both physical and social/cultural – and embrace a larger, more impersonal conception of reality. This severance from individualism is a step even death metal seemed incapable of making. For all its violent ruminations on mortality, however profound, death metal retained a largely very atomised, intimate understanding of life’s end.

By fixating on the passage of deep history, the indifferent vastness of wilderness, and the skewed moral conceptions of pre-Christian theology, black metal purports to be a window allowing us to understand a more constant and fundamentally humbling perspective on reality and our place within it. Aligning it to such terms as “fantastical” – whilst true in a literal sense – can be something of misnomer then. Whilst heavy metal and contemporary power metal views the realm of the traditional fantasy genre as a playground, allowing artists and fans to indulge in epic quests with actually existing notions of right and wrong, black metal attempted to engage with fantasy as a source of weird realism, a kind of rebuttal to liberal democracy’s ambient demands to grow up and engage with consumer capitalism.

Equally, black metal’s alignment with various forms of industrial music saw the same ideas play out under a futurist aesthetic. If both the past and future are perceived as vast, uncaring worlds, ill equipped or even openly hostile to our needs, the present can only be a brief illusion, one that will inevitably dissolve, leading to our demise if we fail to confront these facts with any degree of sobriety.

It’s hardly surprising then, that in the third decade of black metal’s existence it began to confront the modernist condition head on. The early signs of this artistic turn were patchy – a common facet of any genre facing the possibility of its own irrelevance – either taking the form of one dimensional DSBM or a certain strain of atmospheric black metal that was rich in aesthetics but light on content. But it wasn’t long before more serious attempts to confront the here and now were made, efforts that retained black metal’s sense of an inevitable and all powerful constancy, but imbued this with a challenging immediacy, daring the listener to engage with the now beyond enveloping domestic concerns.

Krieg are one of the more heralded American black metal acts, not least because mastermind Neil Jameson is America’s own rather depressive answer to Fenriz. Both being outspoken fans as much as they are musicians, and both can lay claim to a considerable legacy and cultural capital alongside a passion for vinyl. But whereas Frenriz’s eccentric black metal daddy with a huge record collection is an increasingly stale contrivance, Jameson is not afraid to confront us with sincerity, whether that means making demands on the scene that might upset a few folk along the way. Even if his musical offerings boast more misses than hits – and his indulgence of Thurston Moore, someone who is frequently offered a platform within metal by our beloved useful idiots despite demonstrating only pseudo superficial knowledge of the topic – Krieg has always occupied a unique place in the story of post 2000 black metal.

Although Jameson now swears off the first two Krieg albums as the output of a mind too young and ill-equipped to truly convey an artistic message, they remain fascinating studies of second wave black metal as an exercise in the limits of expression through noise along with Profanatica, Impaled Nazarene, Beherit and the like. But with ‘The Black House’ released in 2004, Krieg took a modernist turn. The production was cleaned up, the musicianship tightened, and the conceptual framework shifted toward psychological despondency over playful occultism. EPs with titles like ‘Kill Yourself or Someone You Love’ and ‘Patrick Bateman’ begin to manifest, resituating black metal’s well-established misanthropy in a domestic setting. This was an expression of the mental grind of just existing in the here and now with all its demands and expectations, the relentless requirement to interact with others and the tension this engenders. Each individual instance of unpleasantness may be trivial in itself, but culminates in an overwhelming despondency, a sense of deep loss of something just beyond perception, and the isolation of living amongst millions of unrelated individuals, an isolation more intense than the remotest wilderness.

It is therefore fitting that the Krieg album that perhaps best defined this era was 2010’s ‘The Isolationist’. Although largely overlooked or dismissed by many critics, after returning to this album for the first time since its release its remarkable how much it holds up. It’s a concoction of Krieg’s adept ability to express violence as a loss of control, an anger that has finally unshackled itself and plays out in acts of indiscriminate rage, along with more ethereal and considered qualities that are usually the remit of post black metal, but here find a new and important role. By salvaging ‘The Isolationist’ from being a work of primal fury alone, the gentler aspects of mid-2000s USBM calms the music into states more meditative than those invocating physical and mental discord.

The guitar tone is fuzzy and loaded with bass. Despite the bulk of the music being made up of galloping tremolo picked riffs, they are lent a degree of depth and warmth that only adds to the intrigue of these pieces. It’s as if the black metal’s sparsity has been internalised into the listener in the works of Krieg, the wilderness has been fully assimilated into the psyche, and must be contended with on a deeply immediate level rather than from the imposing and external threats of traditional black metal. Drums are equally warm and rich, displaying an aesthetic that would perhaps be more at home on a stoner doom album. They largely stick to raw blast-beats, with the modesty of the mix lending all a degree of intimacy bordering on the improvisational.

Vocals take a similar approach to MkM’s in their adoption of mid-rage rasping ballads with a loose conception of rhythm. It furthers the organic, almost spontaneous feel to these pieces. Despite the immediacy of the mix, the music is undeniably atmospheric. Minimalist chord progressions race by at breakneck pace, revelling in the violence of their delivery, yet are underpinned by a sense of grim permanence, an inevitability defined by the emphasis of each note as much as the simple minor key cadences they are shaped by.

Lo-fi ambient interludes and experimental noise segments break up the disarming directness of the black metal tracks, and only further the deeply disorientating swirl that sits at the heart of this experiment in black metal as an outlet for (or cause of) psychological warping. For all the speed and activity present at the ontological level, these pieces sit in stasis, developed little beyond their initial themes save for some traditional black metal melodic inflections. There is a sense in which the music is kept deliberately futile, pointless, it achieves nothing save a reminder of the relentlessness and degradation at the heart of modernity’s demands.

Krieg’s ‘The Isolationist’ is an internalised coping device. This is not a work that can or even tries to make sense of our present condition, but only to give voice to the raw experience of it, the betrayal, sense of loss, the anguish at the realisation that this is actually it.

Originally published at Hate Meditations

One of the most heralded lights of the American black metal scene, Krieg have in my mind a sound more defining of that vast nations influence to black metal than any other of their competitors. On sixth album "The Isolationist" the raw and dissonant guitar tone, combined with Imperial's pained, screamed howl and oppressive yet natural drum sound is one that now comes with 'Made in the US' on the underside in much the same way as Sweden and Norway have spewed their product over much of the unforgiving world.

Having worked closely with Blake Judd in Twilight and more importantly in Nachtmystium the proximity between the two is no surprise. Perhaps more a shared influencing of each other would best surmise the pair's musical influence over each other's acts as Krieg's considerably more nihilistic and despairing take on BM does away with the proggier tendencies that have made such an impressive in Nachtmystium's recent work. The feel may be set early on for 55 minutes of insanity driven black metal nausea (that is a complimentary reflection, by the way) with "No Future" and "All Paths To God" being decent songs but following through "Depakote" and to "Remission" and "Dead Windows" at the album's termination it's journey not too satisfactorily loses it's impetus with little a view to ever returning. Commitment to the cause is never in doubt with a man like Imperial at the helm for his track record speaks for itself, but a limited scope and ambition for what the act can truly achieve systematically reins the enjoyability factor of a record like "The Isolationist" in to outside the gates of a ‘great’ record.

Fans with feet already well entrenched within the stenched walls of such urbanely-derived decrepit black metal will rightly find moments to enjoy, as I do myself, but at 55 minutes and with limited ground in which to expand it's purpose “The Isolationist” would have been better served by a trimming of its less calculated crusty extremities.

Originally written for www.Rockfreaks.net

Krieg's sixth full-length (and first since 2006) got a lot of attention in end-of-year lists, so I decided to check out The Isolationist.

Krieg is from New Jersey, and is essentially the one-man project of Imperial, a guy who looks like you might expect any metal dude from Jersey to look. Ironically given its title, The Isolationist employs a number of other musicians.

The sound is appropriately American-style black metal, a bit like a slower and scarier version of earlier Nachtmystium (see "Blue of Noon") with a taste of Cobalt (see "...And the Stars Fell On"). It's urban-sounding and lonely, misanthropic in a way that only those who are surrounded by too many people can be. Usually the drums are going at a faster pace and the guitars at mid-pace; an extreme example of this is the opening riff of "Photographs from an Asylum", with one note for every eight beats. The vocals are very harsh rasp/screeches, and the bass is noticeable but unimportant except in a couple places.

Some of the album is forgettable (like "Decaying Inhalations") or "Remission"), but when Krieg tries something different it really works. "All Paths to God" has a great dissonant riff that breaks things up, and "Ambergeist" has a punk rhythm to it. "Depakote" is structured like a palindrome with its opening Cobalt-esque riff, straight-up USBM, then minimalistic drumming with screams before going back to USBM and ending on the Cobalt riff again.

In a few places the experimentation takes the music to dull places, as when they go to minimalist drumming with sound effects on "Religion III", and when they don't experiment at all it just blends in and becomes utterly forgettable. And there's simply too much of both of these to make the album a standout.

The Verdict: Certainly overrated by the metal press, but not bad by any measure. It has a fair measure of experimentation that works, but gets bogged down by too many boring parts.

originally written for http://fullmetalattorney.blogspot.com/

Isolationist as defined by the Webster dictionary;
–adjective
1. Of or pertaining to isolationism or an advocate thereof.
–noun
2. One who advocates or supports isolationism.

It's been 4 silent years since the last full length Krieg album. In those years we've heard frontman N.Imperial pop-up like a monstrous behemoth emerging out of the frozen waters, looking through its pale amphibious eyes, its next victim. There's been a split here and a new uploaded cover there and some re-issues of past demos, but nothing new as far as a new chapter in the psychologically nightmare that is Krieg's music. Just a few weeks ago the new album was released and it's been worth the wait.

The first hint of what the new album 'The Isolationist" sounds like is of course the widely-released Mp3 "All Paths to God" which hinted a much more fuller, more controlled sound that is way more akin to "The Black House" than the lo-fi almost swan song album "Blue Miasma". In fact "The Isolationist" even sees N.Imperial pushing the experimental edge a bit further. Not unlike Nachtmystium where it's too much, but there are hints and dips of the different shades now that enhance the smothering almost claustrophobic silence where the listener is taken on the terror and fear-inducing panic that comes with such extreme measures. A prime example of this is the song "Depakote.” Named after an anti-convulsant medication used in the treatment of manic depression, N.Imperial shows influences taken from the 80's electronic/post-punk group Public Image Limited. "No Future" is another example, but only by the song title alone seeing how the title was taken from the original 70's Punk counter-culture. Other songs show a creeping ambience in them such as "All Paths to God", "Photographs from the Asylum" and the last quarter of the album hints a return back into those dark, silent, deadly waters that ended "The Black House" album.

In short, "The Isolationist" is not a return, nor a comeback, and not even a continuation, but almost a revisioning of the bleak and nihilistic sonic landscape that is essentially the Krieg sound. It's darker, older, and possibly more dangerous.