Blut Aus Nord – Memoria Vetusta III: Saturnian Poetry

Some of my best friends are black metal albums

Philosophically speaking, black metal has always been a doubled-edged sword. On the one hand, the genre got its start with bands like Celtic Frost and Venom, pioneers who inspired the iconoclastic anti-Christian imagery and lyrical content for which the genre is known. On the other hand, black metal has often coupled this negativity with a mystical reverence for its founders’ pagan ancestry. This combination produces what I would argue is the most attractive ideological element of black metal: its adulatory vision of man in nature as a counterpoint to Christianity, which instead views man as a fallen creature in a sin-filled world. It all sounds a little silly when you Google image search pictures of Immortal, but this heady, inspiring philosophical material has always been a key element of the broader black metal scene.

Though classic black metal records have sometimes emphasized one of these components substantially over the other (De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas is pretty Satan-heavy, whereas Hvis lyset tar oss is less so), most rely upon a clever mixture of both. Darkthrone’s Transilvanian Hunger is one; Emperor’s Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk is another. This isn’t just an obscure point of order, because the two ideologies tend to produce different strains of black metal. The anti-Christian, self-awarely-kind-of-goofy Satanic imagery gives us almost punkish, Venom-influenced fare like Skald av Satans Sol, while the pagan-worshipping imagery gives us the beautiful, mournful tones of early Burzum work. I’m omiting here a discussion of the unfortunate tendency for Nazi imagery to leak into the genre, both because it’s self-evidently awful and because it has little to do with Blut Aus Nord.

Anyway, this is really just an extended way of saying that Blut Aus Nord’s Saturnian Poetry is resolutely part of the mysterious, atmospheric side of black metal. This is its most defining feature above all else, and it has both strong negatives and positives. It’s evident from even a quick glance at the album artwork, which is destined to become a classic.

But most importantly, this reverence for nature is evident in the music. Poetry feels like a blanket of Nordic guitars descending over you that evoke images of snow-capped mountaintops, lush forests, and big-ass fjords. It’s startlingly beautiful, and as several reviewers have noted at various sites, you should really experience this album while walking through the woods on a cold late afternoon. It is as much a meditative experience as it is a piece of music.

And that’s precisely what makes it so hard to evaluate. On one hand, if I were to rate it purely based on the songwriting like I would most other albums, I can’t say it would go much higher than a 5/10. There is almost no stylistic or musical variation whatsoever; every song songs like the next, and I can’t recall a single memorable passage. But if you were asking me to rate it as a contribution to black metal as a genre, or as an artistic experience comprising the artwork, the feelings it evokes, and the majesty that it represents while listened to in a darkened room on a January night during a driving storm, it would be much higher than that.

Some of you may be thinking, “You don’t get it- you just don’t like black metal. All black metal albums are lacking in variation, and they’re all great despite it.” Despite the genre’s reputation for copying the same 5 albums from 1994, that trope is exaggerated. Deafheaven created a similar blanket-of-sound approach with Sunbather, and the tracks on that record are very much distinct. Wolves in the Throne Room, to whom Blut Aus Nord are sometimes compared, have managed a similar feat, even on their earlier material. Just listen to the female vocal passage on Two Hunters. Even early black metal records like Darkthrone’s A Blaze in the Northern Sky featured a variety of styles and segments in extended compositions like those found on Poetry.

Part of the problem with Saturnian Poetry vis-à-vis those albums is the production, which is almost too slick for black metal. The guitars and bass are balanced and mixed well into one another and compressed rather significantly, which accentuates the wall of sound and makes it difficult to pick out the (at least) quad-tracked guitar parts. But part of it is also that Blut Aus Nord just chose not to mix things up at all on this record. You could probably attribute that decision to an artistic expression and make a convincing case, but the fact remains that the band took one half of what makes black metal so great – the melodic, frigid-sounding guitar riffs – and decided to make it the focal point of the album without the more Celtic Frost/Venom-oriented material to break up the flow, and further chose not to use key changes, breaks, acoustic passages, or anything else to balance this choice out. It removes any sense of dynamism from the album and makes it difficult to listen to.

I get why early reviews for this album have heaped praise on it, and if you’re a die-hard fan of this style of black metal, you’re going to love it. But even as a contemplative piece of meditative, evocative art, it still has some real faults that other bands playing a similar style have managed to avoid. 6.5/10.

Memoria Vetusta III: Saturnian Poetry is out now on Debemur Morti. Get the DigiPack here, and listen to a stream here.