Virus West

Challenging, confusing, over-ambitious – these are the words that come to my mind whenever I think of works like “Virus West”. I regret that I do not find access to broad parts of its material, because it seems other black metal supporters don’t have this problem and I wish I could enjoy the album as well. But I can’t, although I admit that the trio had some pretty strong song ideas. Especially the closer “Meuterei” houses great moments. Whenever the fanfares show up, the track reveals its full force. Nevertheless, even the best track of “Virus West” should have been shortened to a length of seven or eight minutes. Nagelfar had an affinity for complexity, but they forgot to keep an eye on song-friendly structures. Already the opener makes this problem obvious.

“Hellebarn” wants to be an all-in-one package. Radical attacks, mid-tempo parts and an almost Viking-like “ohoho-melody” are combined, but the overall picture lacks coherence. The rare melodies are rather weak (this problem returns in “Sturm der Katharsis”, especially the slow part with the clean vocals does not impress due to the pale guitar lines). Aggravating the situation, there is another serious defect. The production sucks. The drums are too loud and they degrade the guitars to a humming background noise during the hyper-fast sections. Moreover, the guitar tone has an unclean, rather noisy than heavy touch. As a result, it takes almost 20 minutes until the first parts appear that make me curious for more. “Hetzjagd in Palästina” begins with very heavy guitars that mark a pronounced improvement after the first two blasts of inconsistency. However, once again I miss an overarching idea, a leitmotif that gives me orientation and leads me through the song. What remains is a pretty good track which gives me the feeling its potential would have deserved a better arrangement.

Speaking of the arrangement, the band has no liaison with smooth breaks. Some work, some damage the songs with their abrupt appearance. “Fäden des Schicksals” is a victim of its breaks, the very amateurish one after 35 seconds and the inadequate one after 2:30 minutes (and the following part delivers terrible vocals). Thank God, the song also presents very intensive, swashbuckling phases and the riffing does ensure a proper foundation. Either way, I would not say that “Virus West” confronts the listener with progressive black metal, but the band performs an unorthodox form of blackness. The suddenly occurring, keyboard-dominated part of “Protokoll einer Folter” underlines this statement. By the way, it’s a great sequence. But unfortunately, it leads to another outburst of senseless brutality and thus the song is devalued. In view of all these details, I do not miss Nagelfar who called it a day after this album. Technical skills and ambitions alone do not necessarily result in a strong record. “Virus West” demonstrates this.

There was a lot of concern over what Nagelfar would sound like after the departure of their popular trademark voice Jander - at least among the many who didn't get a copy of the split with Bluttaufe, and therefore a glimpse of what the band would sound like with Zingultus taking over the vocal duties. Would he manage to fill the void, be a worthy replacement, or a new direction... or just not the same? Fortunately, Zingultus' vocal performance on Virus West would quickly disintegrate all such concerns and scatter them among all four winds, because he is indeed not the same as Jander, nor is he a replacement, but indeed something new, and in that a perfect addition to the sound of Nagelfar. Actually comparing the new voice of Nagelfar with the old would come dangerously close to "apples versus oranges"-type of territory, because there are vast differences in the style of delivery. Jander's maniac shrieking often resembled a raw, inchoate force of nature, like a loose gatling gun of primal screams, while Zingultus vocals are much more refined, and more embedded into the rhythm and melody of the music itself, and while Jander had to alternate between said shrieking and more goth-ish clean to half-clean vocals to keep up with the mood of the music he is singing to, the style of Zingultus has the advantage that it merges itself with the underlying music simply through the style of delivery, with no requirement for any major shift in the way he sings. The vocals are definitely top notch on this album.

However, the vocals aren't all that has changed about Nagelfar in comparison to their earlier releases. With the departure of Jander's aforementioned goth-ish elements, the band apparently decided to make a general shift away from their more romantic and sombre side towards leaning more into a much harsher and aggressive direction, which unfortunately led to a decrease in another very popular - because usually absolutely brilliant - trademark of Nagelfar's earlier sound: The frequent use of acoustic and synthetic elements. While still present on this album, these elements have become much more sparse, only showing themselves in few places, and there only for much shorter periods of times than we were used to. Personally, I find that rather unfortunate, because Nagelfar - or Alexander von Meilenwald in particular - had a unique talent especially for the synthetic parts. And not only the lack of one of my most-beloved elements of Nagelfar's earlier sound is what bothers me, but the effect said lack has on the music as a whole. While the quality of riffing and arrangements is still absolutely classy, the songs tend to suffer from the band's tendency to record overly long pieces with the lack of breaks into contrasting material. In the end, only the final two songs of this album manage to put up enough momentum through highest quality riffs (and are also the songs with the highest use of non-black metal elements) to pull all the way through their length without ever having a feeling of too much repetition. All the others, while overall quite good songs, do have their moments where you just want them to get on with it already.

Overall, as my title suggests, I don't like this quite as much as Hünengrab im Herbst, and certainly not as much as my favourite Srontgorrth, but it's still a Nagelfar album, and any Nagelfar fan can definitely "risk" buying blindly (though of course any Nagelfar fan most likely already has). Fans of German black metal in general should definitely get their hands on this too, as it is still in the upper class of said field, even though it isn't what I would call one of the best, and I'd definitely advise anyone unfamiliar with Nagelfar to get their previous albums first. If every song on here was on one level with the last two songs "Protokoll einer Folter" and "Meuterei", this might have been another classic Nagelfar album, and another high point in German black metal, but because of the weaknesses I mentioned before it is, well, eighty-five percent.

Rich pastures and overflowing forests make way for concrete and iron. Beauty is the tithe man pays in the exercise of bloodlust – nature is the collateral and it is the field of play. Blood-soaked oil replaces water, which flows and feeds the dying landscape in which the earth is drenched. The future is sacrificed, and the scars will not be masked for decades. The trees that grew are no more. The fields lay fallow, as a maze of churned tracks. The wind howls in sorrow; it’s cold nip breeds unease and discomfort. This is Virus West, and it’s going for your jugular.

There’s little doubt here that Nagelfar retain the reverence for the natural world. Instead of championing this cause directly, the perspective is far more nuanced: assess the flailed remains of the landscape, provide the context, and make damned sure that the listener understands that this is not to be desired. To this end, the drums rattle as bullets fly and engines roar through the battlefield that the year before sustained crops for the nearby towns, the guitars tear through as winds and frosts blister the topsoil and strip it bare, and the vocals yearn in agony as if the trees could themselves wail at the loss of their companions. There is no respite. The aggression continues, and you won’t stop it. The war machine crawls on, strip-mining the landscape – the true storm of catharsis. Does the body count stop at the human lives lost, or does it extend further than this? What is the true price of war?

In many respects, the answer to the above is simple, because the clue is in the title: Virus West. As we malign the virus that may tear us apart as we lay in our bed trying to repair, the virus that is man tears apart the landscape, to satisfy its own ends however virtuous or not they may be. There is no sustainability in war. Here’s no peace despite the supposed narrative, which may be the only philosophical comparison to Marduk, despite the pace and the theme Nagelfar offer here. There’s scant outright reference to war, here – Protokoll einer Folter provides a glimpse but Nagelfar here show us the fields following the battle: the flailed remains, soaked in blood and oil, with ripped tree stumps and human limbs in equal abundance. Sorrow stands triumphantly over the carcass as crows peck the eye sockets.

Virus West is the track of the tanks, the upturned frozen soil, the concrete protrusions engorging the valleys, and the myriad effects of the war machine – the sum of which is greater than its individual parts, and more deadly at that. It is a narrative and a eulogy. It is a dance between dead mechanical weights on the spring blossom as the rain pours. It is the barbed wire, and it will snag and rip on everything. It is as it should be.

For fans of: Abigor, Hate Forest, Katharsis, Kermania, Lunar Aurora, Marduk, The Ruins of Beverast.

Another superb album from the German Ván Records community. “Virus West” is Nagelfar’s second and (sadly) the last full-length album. With Zingultus (Endstille) on vocals, Zorn (Ego Noir) on guitars and bass and (nobody less than) Alexander von Meilenwald (The Ruins of Beverast) on drums and keyboards (plus their permanent session keyboardist Garvin), “Virus West” sounds nothing like a three men work – an hour long black metal feast that reminds epic battle scenes, darkness and cold, executed in superior German engineering, with the perfect balance of variation and repetition, nothing unnecessary or “for the sake of it”. Leaning on the epic side of black metal, Virus West is an exceptional piece of art.

Von Meilenwald is pulling all the strings from behind his drumkit here. As masterful as one would expect, his drum work here is both mechanically precise and artfully genius. The album sees frequent shifts in tempo and mood, usually from blast beats to slower atmospheric passages, and his complete control of what is going on makes these a joy to behold. Also the tone is extremely well adjusted, organic and thunderous. Despite casting two keyboardists, these sections of orchestration and chorus are quite rare and it is the guitars that lead the melody and atmosphere. Here we have insane riffs one after another, occasional tremolos and solos. The somewhat distorted bass acts as a rhythm guitar.

Zingultus kills the vocals. He adds so much energy, fury and theatricality to the music. Often using two-track (and sometimes left/right), the tone could really be a bit higher, though. And the best part is shrieking in German. Now, German is an amazing language that suits the music perfectly. Anyone who claims otherwise clearly has a different opinion, which is fine by the way. Just listen to Mahler’s “das Lied von der Erde” or Einstürzende Neubauten’s “Fiat Lux”. As with any other genre of music (or just simple conversation) German fits black metal in glorious fashion.

The album includes 6 10-minutes or so long songs and a small interlude of war drums and keyboards in between that divide the album in two half-hour parts. The album is packed to the brim with amazing material and haunting melodies, but the groovy and headbanging second track “Sturm der Katharsis” is my absolute favourite.

(Originally published at: https://winterwhenyoufreeze.wordpress.com)