MetalSucks

Sweden’s Bergraven fit under the black metal umbrella just at the edge, enough to keep part of its shoulder dry while the rest is soaked with outside influence. And while 2007’s Dödsvisioner fooled around with the genre enough to warrant attention (and not to mention make a great, complex, dense metal record), the band’s followup – Till Makabert Väsen – features only fragments of black metal, and even those are diluted by mainmanonlyman Pär Gustavsson bottomless pot of strangeness. But while Väsen is even more dense and bizarre than Dödsvisioner, it pays off just as big when given the time, because much like its predecessor, it’s a record that requires your time and attention. It’s not an album about beauty or Vikings, but instead obsessed with its own ugliness, dropping a major chord or big chorus in just when things are on the verge of being too displeasing for too long. This is hardly a conventional metal record, and you’ll be hard pressed to find another one that sounds like it; with Till Makabert Väsen, Bergraven continue their journey to the strange, unexplored parts of the psyche.

Where Dödsvisioner is preoccupied with long stretches of quiet dissonance and silence, Väsen is concerned with keeping things up front, not dropping off the map for an undisclosed amount of time. But where one may assume this sheds some light on Bergraven, the band not cloaked in silence is an uncomfortable, almost impenetrable prospect. Jagged, spidery arpeggios rule the album, occasionally brought to order by Gustavsson’s harsh speak-singing, riding all the ugly consonants his native Norwegian tongue has to offer. But desipte that, the album is straight up fucking FASCINATING, leaving one puzzled as to how such an atonal mess, which seems to aggressively taunt you out of listening, is something you would want to return to. Väsen is challenging, but it’s a challenge worth tackling. Once the ugliness becomes familiar, its obscured textures come out: those spidery arpeggios are straight up oddball jazz, like what would happen if Varg Vikernes listened to Cecil Taylor or John Coltrane’s “Om” instead of, you know, thinking all non-Aryan races were inferior. And Bergraven’s darkness isn’t an angsty or misanthropic lot, but instead an interesting study of shadowy corners, completely mature in its execution as opposed to being trapped in a corpsepainted state of arrested development. And when Gustavsson lets his influences leak through – the man has expressed a penchant for composer/longtime David Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti as well as copping to an unironic appreciation of Chris Isaak – they soak the music with lush weirdness, throwing a bone to those that chose to listen to Väsen more than once.

The relative tangibility found on “Hunger” and “Det andra liket” won’t be enough for some, or even most; this is metal one has to be in the mood for at best, an unlistenable mess at worst. But the fine line separating pretension and challenging brilliance in metal is one Bergraven are definitely aware of. This writer believes they’re on the right side of it, but many could/will disagree. But if it hits you right, Till Makabert Väsen has a bucket load of affecting weirdness. It’s unflinching, bizarre, and opaque. Not for the faint of heart or ear.

(4 out of 5 horns)

-SO