In Jeraspunta - Die Rückkehr der tollwütigen Bestie

My first impression of Dark Tribe's In Jeraspunta was very favorable. This album received many rotations for the first week or so of my discovering it, as holistically speaking, the general atmosphere that the songs convey is quite titillating. Besides satisfying the standard slew of adjectives that one ought to be able to apply to black metal of this sort--ferocious, hateful, violent, etc.--In Jeraspunta was unusual for being genuinely exhilarating, and appeared to incorporate some secret alchemical ingredient that gave the album a noticeable auric sheen sadly lacking in the dull and murky nuggets that comprise most black metal releases, even those that are otherwise competently performed. I remember thinking that there was a distinct vein of mental instability here, and maybe even felt a little demented myself after putting the songs on repeat for too long.

However, I summarily twigged that the instability I detected was not a metaphysical aura of spiritual malaise oozing from a source transcending the frequencies themselves, but was instead a concrete instability written into the actual music. In Jeraspunta is a very simple album at heart: it is an album composed entirely around excessively see-sawing contrast. The most bizarre-sounding riffs are steeply ascending and descending tonal ladders, waggling wildly up and down the scale. Austere clean singing competes for attention with high-pitched howls, monotonous shouting, hysterical screaming and raspy shrieks. The songs repeatedly alternate between frenzied riffing and slower, more sorrowful passages. Even the often jagged and unpredictable vocals provide a counterpoint to the cyclic riffs and melodies.

Every song on this album essentially conforms to the above description. Take the second track, "The Seed," for instance. (Amusingly enough, this particular song manages to introduce yet another element of contrast. It begins quietly, then suddenly becomes louder shortly before the half-minute mark.) The first two riffs are just simplistic arrangements of high and low notes (high-high-low-low and low-high-high-low) that together form a stretch of abruptly rising and falling hills and valleys of sound. Then a longer motif kicks in (along with the vocals), which although more complex is just the same thing: some ascending notes, a precarious drop down, repeat with some variation in pitch and duration, then play it all again. As the song goes on, Dark Tribe mixes it up by introducing a particular riff that's shifted up and down the scale. Now they're tonally contrasting entire musical fragments, not just individual notes. This is extremely different from what they were doing before. Anyway, eventually at 3:17 or so the song changes gears with no warning and transforms from driving, mid to fast paced black metal into slow, majestic and mournful black metal. This plays for one and a half minutes. And then the song is over. While the latter section is done well, I can't help but suspect that Dark Tribe, in accordance with their methodology on the rest of In Jeraspunta, tacked it on just to make sure that the end of the song was sufficiently different from the beginning.

That more or less summarizes every track on this record. Dark Tribe will shuffle what they choose to contrast in any given song--for example, on the title track the melodies are more normal sounding, but there are about four vocal styles, and the song pendulums from sad slowpoke to snarling speedster a total of six times. Kind of the opposite of "The Seed," which had more lunatic riffs but was tamer in the other two areas.

In Jeraspunta's obsession with contrast is both its greatest strength (because it creates such a unique sound) and its greatest weakness (because having such a conspicuous auditory linchpin becomes a real earsore rather quickly). As previously stated, I enjoyed this album at first, but once I became aware of the ham-handed compositional approach, it swelled gigantic and overshadowed everything, including the excellent production, the skill of the musicians, and the catchiness of many of the riffs, making the strangeness of the music feel calculated and artificial rather than natural and effortless.

In Jeraspunta is basically a compressed musical rendition of bipolar disorder. While such an experience may be novel (at least for those who are not bipolar), it becomes annoying after too many repetitions. Nevertheless, the instrumentation is decent and the overall sound interesting enough to warrant occasional listens. I put this on from time to time, but only very rarely.

With Summoning and Graveland - maybe the only classic bands still retaining hopeful expectations of consistent innovation and quality from listeners – arguably beginning to fold under the immense weight of self-parody’s temptation, never has black metal had greater need for new, groundbreaking artists to rise up and be counted. Drudkh acquired a surge of praise after throwing out a rapid-fire succession of folk-tinged, hypnotic BM, and Velvet Cacoon if nothing else momentarily reignited a sense of mystery that the genre hadn’t really possessed in years, but neither of these bands did nearly enough to re-ignite the flame. France’s Blut Aus Nord returned from the abyss to throw out a swirling vortex of a record in 2003 hailed by many as black metal’s saviour, and the following year saw countrymates Deathspell Omega attempt something ambitious with an unusual, passionate, theatrical work of metaphysical exploration that many claimed to be the genre’s new shining light, yet there was confusion amongst many circles about just what precisely these bands were trying to communicate, and in what way it was new or interesting. Others delivered strong material, but the wow factor wasn’t quite there. Things were, to many, looking rather bleak. Bleak, that is, until attention was drawn to a work of twisted genius recently conjured over on German soil.

Indeed, perhaps “above” German soil would be more accurate, as there is a distinct sense that Dark Tribe’s “In Jeraspunta…” was sent down from the skies by great universal powers – so great, in fact, that they render our own existence entirely insignificant. Even a cursory listen doesn’t fail to expose the album’s alien feel, and the sheer might, violence and drive behind this piece – many have complained at first listen that it’s simply too much. There’s no shame in this, the best and worst of us are at first left with a cosmicist sense of awe by “In Jeraspunta…”; there’s a sense that powers far more greater than our own are locked in an intense battle of wills. Inhuman shrieks rage over bizarre melodies which seem to be pure expulsions of force, lashing and swarming about a particular note like bees around a hive, or ascending and descending menacingly in step, often with almost a sense of glee. Some of the riffs seem even to mock our insignificance, dancing around the ritualistic drumming as if taken from some deranged and malicious circus, whilst the chanted clean vocals don’t only resonate with power but seem almost to jeer intimidatingly at our petty existence.

Yet, if listening to this piece only instilled feelings of awe and insignificance, it wouldn’t be quite as good as I make it out to be. Nay – the gap between “In Jeraspunta”’s apparent otherworldly power and the individual listening is bridged in the most intimate of ways. Though presented on a stage wholly inhuman and vast in power, the circus-like themes, inter-related and developed throughout the album, seem almost to reflect the absurd circus of one’s own life; human life, instilling recognition that regardless of the greatness of one’s power and will, the Cosmos remains an irrational beast, within which all will inevitably suffer and perish. A depressing feeling - to have the world’s harsh meaninglessness stare you in the face, but by sporadically placing more sombre and beautiful passages through the album Dark Tribe prevent the listener from giving up hope. Still, the final track is marked with a certain sincerity, as if the world is no longer a place for the prior mockery and glee – only the hollow misery of the abyss. One begins to feel oneself teetering on its edge as the ominous chants grow ever louder, the battering of drums ever more frantic, the melodies ever more haunting and devoid of hope, only for the piece to be resolved by one of the most powerful, poignant climaxes metal has ever seen, bringing to a forefront the tragedy of human meaninglessness, and forcing the listener to revel in its inherent beauty.

Any man who can not find his place in this album’s grand scheme, and further, feel inspired by the band's intensity and power, the intelligence of their composition and above all their ability to find tragic beauty in the midst of the absurd, is surely no man at all.