FREELOADER: A GREENBERGIAN ANALYSIS OF FOUR ALBUMS BY LONELY DUDES

Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out four albums made by (mostly) solitary dudes.

Influential American art critic Clement Greenberg coined the term “post-painterly abstraction” to describe a movement of painters in the ‘40s and ‘50s that were abandoning traditional elements like subject matter and visible brush strokes, and instead exploring the flatness and two-dimensionality of the painter’s canvas – the things that make painting unique from other art forms. Greenberg would analyze the degree to which a painting laid these qualities bare, thus revealing a certain painterly purity and truthfulness.

The one-man metal project has been a thing at least since Bathory’s glory days. In this edition of Freeloader, I’m subjecting albums by a few recent lonely metalsmiths to a Greenbergian analysis – as in, how well does each album expose the qualities unique to the one-man metal band?

Kuldvas – The Lightless Path

There is no mistaking this debut by instrumental act Kuldvas for anything but a one-man black metal project. Or at least the scratch demo tracks for a one-man black metal project – Morrisville, Pennsylvania resident Peter Hraur concocted The Lightless Path entirely out of guitars, rendering the album spookily empty. About half of the album is traditional enough that it really would benefit from being fleshed out further, and the whole thing needs remixing to smooth over the seams between overdubs. But Hraur does a whole lot with his limited instrumental palette, creating both hermetic soundscapes (“Shadows in the Mist,” “Last Branch”) and regal riff chains (“Gone in Forests Forgotten,” “Lost Eternally”) that suggest that he has the capacity for something much less austere. As is, this is a near-ideal one-man project in the Greenbergian sense: in both its cloistered atmosphere and its patchwork editing, The Lightless Path is more than just the product of a single man. It sounds like it was created for only that man to hear.

(4.5 out of 5 Clement Greenbergs)

Download The Lightless Path here.

Adam Emanon – Subterranean

Adam Emanon has a Devin Townsend quote as the epigraph of his website: “Yes, I like heavy music and am good at making it, but that is not all that I listen to, and that is not all that I want to play.” Sure enough, this Canadian solo artist’s most recent EP, Subterranean, implies heaviness in its chunky guitar riffs but deliberately lowers the guitars in the mix to give it a self-described “earthtoney” sound – a good match for the “earth” installment in his four-part series of nature-themed EPs. Emanon’s instrumental compositions are far less defined than his concept, and if there’s one factor that pegs this as a one-man release, it’s the flat dynamics of every one of these songs. The paces are uniformly lethargic (Emanon doesn’t help matters by titling the final track “Cumbersome”) and the songs are amelodic, with distant synths cropping up indiscriminately like hecklers yelling from a passing car as you walk down the street. Instrumental layers work needlessly at cross-purposes. That effect could be cool if it were intended to destabilize the music, as Gorguts or Ehnahre do, but on Subterranean, it’s the byproduct of amateur writing. As a result, Subterranean sounds less like the unified vision of a single creator and more of an insufferable rehearsal jam by a bunch of decent musicians that aren’t clicking at all.

(2.5 out of 5 Clement Greenbergs)

Download Subterranean plus bonus content here.

Surachai – Plague Diagram

Technically, this grinding industrial project from audio terrorist Surachai Sutthisasanakul is only sort of a solo album. The dude enlisted five well-known noise mongers (including an ex-member of NIN and Merzbow/Skinny Puppy collaborators) to sizzle his downtuned Meshuggah chugging in all manner of digital signal processing and modular synth fuckery. What Plague Diagram lacks in the Greenbergian purity of its construction, it more than makes up for in the single-mindedness of its assault. There is no separating the metal and the power electronics strands of Plague Diagram’s mutant DNA. As but one example, the rusty metal riffage that steamrolls through “Ashes” arises out of a buzzing digital abattoir, then collapses into a chilling morass of oil and severed electrical wiring; each half of the equation is equally bleak, equally apocalyptic.

(3.5 out of 5 Clement Greenbergs)

Download Plague Diagram here.
(also available: clear, 180-gram deluxe vinyl and $3 hi-def digital version)

Undying – A Haunt Within the Mist

A series of misled label deals prevented Undying’s debut A Haunt Within the Mist from being released in the same year that it was recorded, back in 2006. And it’s a damn shame, because the defunct British black metal band might have been heralded with the same reverence as Wolves in the Throne Room, Altar of Plagues or Wodensthrone. Like those three, Undying’s lone member Hiraedd looked toward Weakling’s enveloping BM tone poems instead of the necro atmospherics of black metal’s second wave. Riffs are non-existent, making way for shimmering washes of tonal guitars and exhalations of keyboards. The harmonic cadences on “Fog Envelops the Lightless Earth” and “Beyond Monoliths of Frost” are familiar, though there are so many textural shifts within each song that they never feel static. Bass can be an afterthought in this kind of BM. Hiraedd doesn’t treat it that way, and he’s also a brilliant drummer. Or drum programmer – it’s hard to tell, which is a good thing.

A lyric like “Dark winds howl over the blighted peaks / Stirring the silent fields of crumbling bones / A wordless, lifeless soliloquy / Amid the leaden profundity of death” romanticizes loneliness, and by dissolving Hiraedd’s rasps in the guitar maelstrom, so does Undying’s music. Instrumentally, Undying is as close as any one-man project can get to sounding like it was made by a full band firing on all cylinders. On that front it’s a failure from Greenberg’s perspective, in that it really doesn’t abide by the limitations of the single creator. But conceptually this album is a Greenbergian ideal, in that both lyrics and music are literally consumed with the notion of solitude.

(3 out of 5 Clement Greenbergs)

Download A Haunt Within the Mist here.

-SR