BURZUM: BACK FOR THE FIRST TIME ON BELUS
I can honestly say I’ve never had a more complicated relationship with a band than I’ve had with Burzum. Despite an ongoing fascination and reluctant adoration of black metal, I managed to all-but-avoid the band until a year or two ago (when I got my hands on Filosofem and had to confess that mainman/only-man Varg Vikernes had a good thing going). My main issue was what many of Burzum/black metal-in-general’s detractors also have: Varg’s outspokenly racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic views, and (to a bizarrely lesser extent) his part in the rash of Norwegian church burnings and the murder of Mayhem’s Euronymous in the early ’90s looms larger than the music itself. While being an outspoken proponent of separating the art from the artist, there was something just off about enjoying Burzum: thinking Dave Mustaine was a born-again nutball, Lars Ulrich was a whiny millionaire, and Gene Simmons was a major-league asshole didn’t make me like their music any less. Even non-metal incidents of racism and anti-Semitism (Public Enemy’s Professor Griff referring to Jews as “wicked” in an interview and Elvis Costello drunkenly remarking that Ray Charles was an “ignorant nigger,” for example) didn’t lessen my appreciation for their work (though perhaps that had to do with extensive apologizing on both parts). But Varg’s Aryan-centric beliefs seemed like a line I couldn’t cross, that liking his music would somehow be justifying what he believed (I know there are many that still argue that). Putting a barrier between his music and me seemed like the wise thing to do.
Of course, singling out Burzum as deplorable when enjoying brutal death metal and some strains of grindcore where lyrical implications of horrific violence toward women are so par for course that it’s a cliché is laughably hypocritical at best; I have doubts that all extreme death metallers secretly have progressive feminist views in lieu of deep-seeded issues with women that they let breathe in goregrind and the like. So while saying that Vikernes’ values have nothing to do with anything in terms of his music is incredibly short-sighted, it’s just as ignorant to write off any music he makes — even if it’s not explicitly about racial purity — because his social beliefs are the literal polar opposite of yours. Even when realizing that, it still took me a while to warm up to Burzum. But once I did, I heard what so many of the bands that he inspired — Xasthur, Nachtmystium, Wolves in the Throne Room, and Krallice, to name a (very) few — had heard: long, droning, rambling buzzsaw riffs that almost always went on too long, but often showed flickers of brilliance. By the time he reached Filosofem — Burzum’s most mature outing in its original run — he’d provided a high water mark for both him and the genre. Of course, right after recording it, he brutally murdered a guy and went to prison. After being released last year serving sixteen years of his 21-year sentence (and recording a few ambient albums), he’s returned with his first black metal album since 1996 with Belus, a record that’s at once true to his origins (near-constant tremolo picking, blastbeats, raspy vocals) and a showcase for the artistic strides he’s apparently been internalizing for the last decade. It’s at once a return home and a fresh start, perhaps a fitting metaphor for the man’s journey.
