Wardruna and the Power of the Subgenre

This past Halloween, I was scouring amazon and iTunes listening to what was going on in black metal. I've always been fascinated by really dark metal music. When I was a kid, I loved Black Sabbath. As a teenager, I was introduced to Celtic Frost's classic album To Megatherion. Maybe the fascination was that I grew up in a very religious, upper middle class town, and I loved anything that spit in the face of that? Who knows. Since then, I've strayed into all sorts of different genres and have accumulated a lot of disparate musical tastes.

More recently, when Celtic Frost reunited for their dark comeback album Monotheist, I found myself oddly interested in checking out this genre again. I like the extreme nature of the music, but I dislike the stereotypical output most bands represent: faux Satanism, growly singing that sounds like Cookie Monster, etc. I like atmospherics, expression, and real darkness bleeding from a down tuned guitar. I also like when bands in this genre do things that break the mold without watering down the power of the music.

Along these lines, I quickly found another great unique piece of black metal: Ahab's The Call of the Wretched Sea. It's an album of doom or funeral metal (I don't pretend to understand the difference between all these subgenres; they all get stored under 'black metal' on my ipod). The cool thing about this album is that it is inspired by Moby Dick, and the lyrics are culled from Melville's prose in that novel. Pretty cool, especially since I'm (still) working my way through this Melville opus. There's definitely a doom and gloom atmosphere to some of Moby Dick that really fits with doom/black metal music.

I came across bands like Mayhem and Gorgoroth, whose members seem to be pretty overt Satanists (or something). Church burners, murderers, and all sorts of crazy stuff. I have no idea why this all fascinates me, by the way, but it does. LOL! As I was listening to samples in itunes and fending off Jim's 'what they hell are you listening to this crap for?' comments, I came across an absolutely phenomenal band: Wardruna.

The band is led by Kvitrafn, a former drummer for Gorgoroth. He quit the band a bunch of years ago to focus on Wardruna. A Norwegian, Kvitrafn is interested in ancient runes that formed the basis of Norwegian religions from the past. He decided to make musical interpretations of each of the key runes, and he used primitive instrumentation to do this: self-made frame drums, goat horns, the tagelharpe (or Viking fiddle), etc. There are also naturals sounds, like water, fire, rain, and wind, as well as vocal chants.

The first Wardruna album (of a proposed trilogy) is Runaljod - Gap Var Ginnunga. The music on the album is like nothing I have ever heard. It has a bit of the darkness you'd find in black metal, but it is merged with folk music and even a bit of new age in order to form something completely unique! It's a very personal vision, and that makes the album one of a kind. I love it!

I think this is why I have enjoyed fishing around in various subgenres at different times: gangsta rap, techno, black metal, trip hop, etc. You can always find artists there who are really in love with their music and who are totally committed to it in such a deep way that their passion makes their music transcend the genre they inhabit (or even leave the genre in the case of Wardruna). I love having my ear twisted in this way!