Blut Aus Nord – 777: Cosmosophy (Debemur Morti)
There are certain merits to anything that can be ascertained by comparing subjective preconception with whatever of its factual essence can be gleaned. A filthy diner might make the best hamburger; the dustiest book in the loneliest shelf of the least funded library might contain the most profound of truths. In the case of Blut Aus Nord, a listener is presented with music that’s often lumped in with, and originates from, black metal, but at this point bears almost no resemblence to anything suggested by the genre tag.
Blut Aus Nord – 777: Cosmosophy (Debemur Morti)
There are certain merits to anything that can be ascertained by comparing subjective preconception with whatever of its factual essence can be gleaned. A filthy diner might make the best hamburger; the dustiest book in the loneliest shelf of the least funded library might contain the most profound of truths. In the case of Blut Aus Nord, a listener is presented with music that’s often lumped in with, and originates from, black metal, but at this point bears almost no resemblence to anything suggested by the genre tag. Certainly the band had their genesis in that style, and while their music always relied on sly subversions of expectation, their newest LP is a whole different affair altogether, one that retains few qualities of the genre other than its icy sturm und drang.
The album’s five songs act as the conclusion of the 777 trilogy and exist as something of a paradox. Though they act in tandem as part of a larger, cohesive work (not only in terms of this album but of the triptych that it concludes), each is titled “Epiphany XIV” successively through “Epiphany XVIII.” The terminology suggests something of a standalone quality, a unique and unrepeatable burst of enlightenment that seems to indicate something other than interrelation. If it comes off wholly pompous to apply nomenclature like “epiphany” to one’s own music, it’s not entirely unwarranted within the context of Cosmosophy. Each song, while complementing the others, possesses its own unique internal dynamic, one in which microcosmic ebbs and flows build into a macrocosm of sound that never remains stagnant or falters in its intensity.
This largely takes the form of a metallic, quasi-industrial dirge–somewhere in the neighborhood of the lurching pound of Godflesh and the black hole density of early Swans, but possessing a melodic flair and a sense of nuance that renders it distinct from any of its predecessors. Over hazy guitars, vocals push upwards in triumph (incidentally, one of the few other similarities to black metal as a whole could be the similarities between Blut Aus Nord singer Vindvahl’s voice and that of Isahn from Emperor), keyboard textures subtlely snake their way through the songs’ more aggressive components, and brittle electronic elements occasionally make themselves known, breaking up the album’s grandeur with subtle, sinister atmosphere.
Whether Cosmosophy represents Blut Aus Nord’s wholesale transition from black metal into something more distinctly their own, or whether it respresents an outlier in their larger body of work, remains to be seen. Regardless, it raises questions about genre itself. How much does any body of work have to adhere itself to expected signifiers? How many can it eschew and still remain a part of the larger stylistic corpus? It’s difficult to say whether there are any answers to be found in this album, and that may well be one of the reasons that, anomalous or otherwise, it’s the band’s strongest, most compelling work to date.
