REVIEW: Drudkh ‘A Handful of Stars’ (Season of Mist)

While their politics may be forever enshrouded in the murky fog rolling down off the Carpathians, the actual sonics of Ukrainian atmospheric black metal hermits Drudkh have gained considerable clarity and focus over the last couple of releases, and the hype has undeniably grown with them. There’s a lightness of touch to ‘A Handful of Stars’, moreso than the breakthrough, magazine-moistening ‘Microcosmos’, and simplicity to the interplay between harsh, strained, typically black metal exhortations and emotive, earth mother instrumentals which sees the band bob gently into a vague orbit in the overpopulated, debris-cluttered airspace between post-metal and post-crust, the guitar lines that open ‘Twilight Aureole’ having more than a twinge of Swedish progressive metal chestpounders Burst about them, while the weeping guitar that close ‘The Day Will Come’ seem liberated from one of those dad-friendly ‘driving song’ compilations with a bad ass rig on cover.

Were this any other band than one so stubbornly committed to reclusive cave-dwelling mysticism, it’d be an obvious plea for commercial success - the beefier production, the more accessible melodies lacking the density and primal thunder of, say, 2004’s ‘Autumn Aurora’, are easily the meandering, woodland equivalent of Anaal Nathrakh’s exchange of bowel-loosening, grime-caked terror for more moshpit-friendly party hits. But the crucial difference is that Anaal Nathrakh made their transition without losing their might, and somewhere in the recording process, Drudkh’s once formidable elemental fury that threatened to swallow up the listener like an angry forest with a big angry mouth, has been considerably diminished. ‘A Handful of Stars’ is a fine place for a picnic, the view is chocolate box lovely and the thorns have been cleared from the path, but it makes for an underwhelming full-length when set aside landmarks from their potent past.

REVIEW: Al-Thawra ‘Edifice’ (Subaltern)

Globalisation, that old bugbear of the vomit-caked

shirking classes that make up the crust punk underground, has painted every double-arch in gold leaf and sold the idea of primo latte frappucinos to people who don’t even have running water, but perversely, it’s brought us ‘Edifice’, a lo-fi nugget of such profoundly sincere spirituality and vision, caked in rage that’s open-wound sore and informed by the world’s relentless blitzkrieg of injustice. Globalisation brought together caustic, doom-fired d-beat, born in England and perfected in Sweden, the teachings of Muhammad and the teachings of Marx, traditional Arabic instruments and a hard-touring quartet from Chicago, and stewed them in purpose. Where the band’s debut, ‘Who Benefits From War?’ was untutored savagery, ‘Edifice’ is an immersive sonic whole, dragging you slowly down into a warm bubble bath of hypnotic, swirling instrumentals and rhythmic barking, driving crust riffs and dubstep bass fuzz like Anti-Sect’s unintentional ‘two-track’ rock opera ‘In Darkness There Is No Choice’.

Beyond the music, Al Thawra, one of the original disciples of Taqwacore, are providing this scene’s arteries with a throbbing adrenaline shot of individuality, not a trite strip-minding of some ’exotic’ belly dancing melodies, but an organic sum total of this quartet’s multicultural identity, the atypical and the typical. In a genre, which despite its pretentious to dissent and inclusivity is still defined by its WASP archetype, its empty cage-rattling to a set of prescribed first world white middle class problems, Al Thawra are a reminder of how much clout punk still has in its dual service to challenge and empower.

COMMENT: Insane in the Ukraine, in defence of Drudkh

The press officer (and respected metal journo in his own right, which is a rare and paradoxical beast) for Season Of Mist got in touch to raise issue some points from the previous Drudkh blog, more as a massive fan of the band than 'image management', so for interested parties, his points are in bold and my responses are plain:

If correct, I would recommend getting your historical facts on Ukraine from outside of Polish text books (and to look even further back for an explanation of anti-Polish, anti-Jewish resentments in Ukraine). It is quite easy to get the historic background, if one goes beyond WWII.

Obviously I didn't get my information from Polish text books, I'm English. Secondly I did reference the history of anti-Polish sentiment in the Ukraine prior to WWII, which is confusingly acknowledged in a later paragraph (1). Thirdly as what I was writing was in direct response to Drudkh's more overt nationalist references, it wasn't really up to me what I passed comment on.

That comparison to Radovan Karadžić is beyond me, except for the purpose of introducing another murderous war criminal... but while everybody else in Europe is allowed to build nation, Ukraine is obviously not, well according to you: “But what we can pass damning judgment on is that the Ukraine they fought for was defined purely on ethnic lines where clear ethnic lines didn’t necessarily exists – especially as the would-be nation had formed part of a union with Poland and Lithuania for centuries...” (1) as if there had been no struggle against this “union” in those centuries – compare: (and to look even further back for an explanation of anti-Polish, anti-Jewish resentments in Ukraine.) By the way, Lithuanians are part of the Baltic language family and very clearly separated – quite a bad argument for the point you are so desperately struggling to make. Well, you English like “unions” as the Irish can tell part of your empire for centuries, which proves... – (oops, I get polemic, sorry, but I should not pass damning judgement). And where did ever clear ethnic lines exist? That was a romantic notion lacking historic facts all over this... but hey, if you are a Ukrainian patriot at the time, you are obviously a Nazi as defined by you above... err, what?

This point is very confused. I don't think it's up for debate that every people who find themselves without a free homeland are entitled to one, if necessary fight for it. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the chunk of this sprawling commonwealth that would become the Ukraine was influenced by centuries of outside influences, its major cities were heavily Polish and, more recently, in the late 18th Century, Russian Jews had been encouraged to settle thereand in Poland - their poverty and obvious outsider status (which even established, cosmopolitan Polish Jews resented) contributing to what would become grotesquely genocidal antisemitism by the time the Einsatzgruppen party squads turned up in their mobile party wagons. But what the individuals and organisations canonised by Drudkh were fighting for wasn't a nation defined by geographic boundaries but by the (often perceived, and by calling it a "romantic notion" you're agreeing that the definition was bogus and no such demarcation between Poles and Ukrainians was realistically possible, which makes your implied apologism of their murderous methods seem a touch bizarre) ethnicity of the people within it, resulting in what can only be described as ethnic cleansing to use contemporary language.

There are plenty of examples of this in history and they are all, without exception abhorrent. The expulsion of Germans and Hungarians from Czechoslovakia after the Second World War, the population transfers between Greece and Turkey in 1923, the partition of Pakistan and India, and you'll be particularly excited to note, the expulsion of Irish Catholics from their land in Cromwell's Act of Settlement - all of these are the inhuman actions of a state that values its integrity above human lives, so no, being a Ukrainian patriot at the time doesn't make you a "Nazi", but being a Ukrainian patriot who believes that all Poles and Jews should either leave their homes, or go to a mass grave in the woods, that does put you on the wrong side of any objective moral line.

Why you find comfort in Slayer openly embracing that fascist murderer Pinochet, but condemn Drudkh for choosing to remain silent and let their art speak, is hardly understandable - well have fun with it.

I find comfort in the fact that Slayer are able to have a public/open discourse about their beliefs, yet Drudkh won't - leaving us to draw our own conclusions, which is the point of the original piece. If an English band (with links to openly racist bands) were to embrace murderous, puritanical despot/national hero and defender of parliamentary democracy (delete to fit view) Oliver Cromwell and refuse to do interviews while aligning themselves with a right wing 30s political movement, any sane man would jump to the same conclusion. And I am having fun with it, it's fun to learn and it's fun to discuss. Discussion is, after all, the furnace where views are tempered.

COMMENT: Satanic Warmaster probably aren’t Nazis, just idiots

The bête noir of Antifa’s Finnish branch, Satanic

Warmaster ooze Third Reich fetishism from every pore. Sole member Satanic Tyrant Werwolf ambiguously phrased certainly contemporary ideologies which are rooted in Nazism, but without saying whether they were universal healthcare or ethnic cleansing, and hanging around with 100 per cent unrepentant, Sieg Heiling arseclowns like Absurd and Der Stürmer, he allows people looking for a reason to wave pitchforks to construct the reason themselves. Fascism and racism are very real concerns; there are enough genuine hateful idiots around without your kneejerk Antifa bottle-flinger rounding up the 2 + 2.5 to 5 just because it’s a ‘cleaner’ number with no messy uncertainty that keeps you from getting a good old witchunt under way.

Listing the Nazi references is a bit of a duck hunt for a band whose second demo was called ‘Gas Chamber’, but this kind of infantile taboo-busting was old and boring when Satanic Warmaster sprung into being in 1998, and actual evidence about what this jet black dildo genuine believes is thin on the ground. Early demos described his stance as ‘Occult nationalism’, which seems to be a profound belief in two things which are equally stupid and made up, but that hasn’t cropped up since. Although, predictably enough for this blend of bombastic , tremolo-raping hornets’ nest black metal, both are cravenly hinted at by every other song title, as they have been by almost every band in the genre – albeit not quite with Satanic Tyrant Werwolf’s autistic frequency. After over a decade of existence he’s crammed enough Third Reich slogans, lyrics and buzzwords into his album and merchandise to reconstruct ‘Mein Kampf’ a segment at a time like a set of hateful fridge magnets, but he has yet to produce a sentence which actually sets out what he believes, instead hiding behind a set of dull clichés about the blood of dead warriors, marauding wolfpacks and the like.

Satanic Warmaster are worst than fascists, they’re just boring and silly, and their sly little backward glances towards actually coming out and saying something controversial are only offensive to the values of people who are looking to be offended.