MetalSucks

If not, you’re seriously missing out.

After is easily my favorite thing released so far in 2010, up there with Shining’s Blackjazz… with whom Ihsahn shares a saxaphone player, interestingly enough. Those expecting black metal akin to Ihsahn’s Emperor alma mater should look elsewhere, because you definitely won’t find that here. I find the music on After to be uncategorizeable other than just “metal” and [perhaps] distinctly Scandinavian. It’s avant garde, it’s experimental, it’s deep and it’s complex yet catchy and accessible, but it doesn’t come close to fitting into any pre-defined niche. It’s just really, really fucking good music, the kind you just know is the result of intense scrutiny of every single sound and note.

Check Sammy O’ Hagar’s glowing review of After as well as his fascinating interview with the man himself.

Ihsahn’s only got one song from the new album up on his MySpace page (“The Barren Lands,” all the way at the bottom of the player), but even this one song gives a good taste of what After is about (though by no means summarizes it).

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Ihsahn’s After is perhaps the biggest curveball of his career thus far. At the very least, the man deserves credit for combining prog rock, technical death metal, and nimble saxophone accompaniment into something other than an unlistenable clusterfuck. But After is more than a non-clusterfuck: it’s easily the most distinctive of his post-Emperor work, if not possibly his best as a solo artist. For the first time, In the Nightside Eclipse sounds like an eon ago, if not foreign altogether.

Of course, Ihsahn is aware of this. The man sounds proud when talking about his latest, the last of his first trilogy of solo albums, as well as at peace with his past. In an interview with MetalSucks, he talks about After’s origins, the hypocrisy of the “black metal” mindset, the status of Emperor, and the surprisingly pragmatic reason why it took him so long to play out as a solo artist.

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Now’s your chance to have a listen to what might be my favorite album of 2010 so far, former Emperor frontman Ihsahn’s second solo album After. The entire album is streaming for free at Plugd. I’m really excited for you all to hear this record so you can tell me whether it’s just me or it really is fucking brilliant.

If you’re expecting the black metal drone of Emperor, don’t; Ihsahn’s solo work is something completely different, made to be judged on its own accord. After is a veritable melting pot of influences both from within metal and without, and while some black metal overtones occasionally make themselves known there is no mistaking that this is not a black metal record at all. It’s stylistically all over the map, yet it somehow holds together in one cohesive whole.

Stream After on Plugd. You’ll need to have a Facebook account to login.

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Upon listening to Emperor for the first time in a little while when prepping for an interview with Ihsahn (coming soon!), I found it remarkable how the Emperor of In the Nightside Eclipse is a completely different band from that on their ridiculously dense blackened death prog swan song, Prometheus: The Discipline of Fire and Demise. Though one could argue that some of this had to do with the band’s multiple line-up changes, the band’s core – Ihsahn and guitarist Samoth – were present throughout. Using “evolution” in terms of the lifespan of a band was pretty much coined for groups like Emperor, seeing as they progressed from a scrappy True Norwegian black metal upstart to something beyond that altogether, becoming so different from their origin that they had to split up to pursue different avenues (Samoth with blackened death kingpins Zyklon and Ihsahn with his more expansive, prog-minded solo material). Emperor bucked the trend of picking a sound and sticking to it (and the genre’s general hypocrisy of staunchly preaching individuality while decrying any band that deviates from a certain set of rules as to what a black metal band is supposed to sound like) by being the band they needed to be, and though their reliance on keyboards and operatic singing may sound silly at first, Ihsahn’s compositional prowess (he composed all of Prometheus himself on top of working with Samoth for the rest of the band’s albums) would be a shame to ignore.

Which was what I always found disappointing about his solo work: while always quite enjoyable, it never really emerged from the shadow of Emperor. For every great, kinda-interesting-on-its-own moment, there’s been a riff that could have wound up on one of Emperor’s late-period works. The sense of constant evolution that drove the band has been sadly missing from Ihsahn’s solo material. Fortunately, on After, his latest, he emerges bravely with nothing reminiscent of his past. And while this will bring a tear to the eye of the dudes who shelled out a few hundred dollars to see Emperor play stateside a few years ago, the album is often exciting and brilliantly complex while being almost completely devoid of black metal. Closing out a trilogy of albums recorded under his own moniker, Ihsahn has made what is, at the very least, his most interesting album of solo material to date, if not (very easily) his best. Scoff at its lack of true-ness if you must, but After is an excellent album. Almost a decade after the dissolution of Emperor, the man has finally come into his own.

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Am I the only one here that thinks that American bands shouldn’t be allowed to wear corpse paint? There should be a law in the metal books that states it. There’s some rules that us American metalheads must follow, like the famous “Don’t Wear Your Own Band’s Shirt Law,” for instance. It doesn’t apply to Europeans and that’s okay, they’ve got their own set of laws. It applies to us, though, and when you break it, people get to talking.

Well, I think that corpse paint should fall under the “Must Never Be Applied To The Face Of An American” law. I think it should be punishable by excommunication from the community. I’ve got my reasons.

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Chocolate chips pancake. Black coffee. Burnt toasts with butters. No fruits. Empty calories ist krieg.

Speakings of “Empty”: this ist inspired by my friends, Satan Rosenbloom. May it sends you to an early graves.

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Emperor, Prometheus – The Discipline of Fire & Demise (Candlelight, 2001)
Ihsahn – Vocals/Guitars/Synths/Bass/Programming
Samoth – Guitars
Trym – Drums
Produced by Ihsahn

Screw you guys. Emperor don’t need your stupid list of the 21 Best Metal Albums of the 21st Century. They probably don’t give a fuck about how they’re remembered, and not just because they’ve had convicted arsonists, murderers and flying elves in their ranks. Emperor had achieved legendary status long before Prometheus – The Discipline of Fire & Demise was conceived by main man Ihsahn, so perhaps the only place to go was bigger, grander, more complex. Lucky for Ihsahn that his bandmates Samoth and Trym were busy getting their blackened death metal project Zyklon off the ground – there are very few checks to Ihsahn’s grandiose ambitions on Prometheus. The album is the sound of a master metal craftsman, lost in his own imagination, polishing and tweaking and overdubbing until every last detail gleams like obsidian.

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Since its inception in the late ‘80s, black metal has been one of the most rigid genres in terms of evolution and change. While bands like Cradle of Filth, Dimmu Borgir, and Behemoth trumpet the genre through its larger than life, orchestral origins, black metal’s “elite” have gained their notoriety through either a) being a part of the original church-burning generation and altering their sound as little as possible or b) miming the original church-burning generation as closely as possible, right down to the tape hisses and wall of buzz saw guitars. But after nearly two decades of existence and reverence in the metal and music worlds as a whole, many bands have moved away from their restrictive lo-fi roots and come to embrace different influences, resources, and inspirations. The band that has best exemplified this move from their base to the outer limits is Enslaved, one of Norway’s longest running black metal bands. Before American upstarts Nachtmytsium made it cool to melt your Burzum and Pink Floyd records together, Enslaved were dabbling in the dark power of psychedelia on Below the Lights and ISA. Though those who take black metal seriously insist that sticking to their guns has been the key to longevity, its shifts in sounds and ideologies has been what’s kept it alive. Those shifts have been most solidly illustrated by Enslaved, and has resulted in one of the most impressively consistent discographies in metal, right up through their latest genre-bending triumph Vertebrae.

Grutle Kjellson, Enslaved’s bass player and lead vocalist, has been with the band since the beginning. In an interview he was kind enough to grant MetalSucks via phone from his home in Norway, he talks about the importance of looking forward creatively, what influenced Vertebrae, working with longtime bandmate Ivar Bjornson in Enslaved and their experimental metal side project Trinacria, the overall importance of Pink Floyd on his band’s sound, and the fans that only want to hear songs off of their early ‘90s demos at their shows.

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There’s a long history of a front man striking out on his own, with results both equal (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Phil Collins, Morrissey, King Diamond, etc.) and horribly inferior (hey, didn’t Bruce Dickinson make some solo albums?) to their original band’s output. So in theory, Ihsahn – the former/current front man of Emperor, one of the essential jewels in the True Norwegian Black Metal crown – had the odds against him: his post-Emperor output had varied from an aborted project with Rob Halford to being in a goth-metal band with his wife to giving guitar lessons in his hometown. His decision to wait 5 years before releasing a solo album was seemingly odd, and results were mixed. But with this year’s angL, Ihsahn’s second solo effort, do we finally get an idea of what that dude from Emperor has been up to as opposed to what that guy Vegard from Norway has been doing in between shoveling his driveway and helping Bjorn learn his minor scales. With enough blackened majesty to remind us why we loved him in the first place alongside new influences to keep the record from being a rehash of his former glory, angL is a layered, intense album that unfolds with repeated listens while still managing to impress from the get-go.

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I somehow missed this story until I was browsing Metal Injection last night, but there’s been another twist in the saga that is the young band Abigail Williams. A statement on the band’s MySpace blog reads as follows:

“We’re currently working through the pre-production stage of our yet-to-be-titled full-length album due out through Candlelight Records later this year. James Murphy (Daath, Resurrection, Rise) will be producing the effort set to be tracked this Feb/March in Florida. We’re excited to announce that the drumming on this album will be handled by the legendary Trym (Emperor, Zyklon). Our previous drummer, Zach Gibson, has recently parted ways with the band and we wish him the best of luck in the future. The current lineup also features the return of original keyboard player, Ellyllon. A new pre-production demo titled ‘Floods’ has been posted on our page, which features Zach Gibson on drums, but will be re-recorded by Trym on the actual full-length release. Let us know what you think!”

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