Taake + Noregs Vaapen
What is there to write about Noregs Vaapen? As a critic, I’m supposed to tell you why Taake’s latest album is worth hearing, but it’s so courageous, so exuberant, so effortlessly powerful that it justifies itself. I’m supposed to explain how it sounds and how it works, but in analyzing the finer points of the songwriting I’d almost be doing a disservice to its awe-inspiring wholeness. Above all, Taake’s songwriter and frontman Hoest has hit on a feeling distinct from anything else I’ve ever heard.
The thing is, I can’t really tell you how it feels, because it’s first and foremost a gut level impact, an immediately compelling force that is really specific to this music. But I’ll try and give you a sense of the atmosphere that grows out of that feeling. Noregs Vaapen really exudes the “Scandinavian cowboy” vibe. That might sound like a pretty ridiculous vibe, but it actually makes a lot of sense. Think about the sublime vastness of the landscape—whether mountains and forests or prairies and deserts, the Nordic hinterlands and the American West are both full of inhuman beauty, and the Viking or cowboy is the man who feels at home in this terrain. And remember that many of the Vikings were frontier homesteaders, raising cattle and sheep. Today, their descendants include the many bearded, sunglassed, leather-wearing, truck-driving dudes who populate the small towns and wildernesses of Norway, Sweden, and Finland. And if you’ve ever seen an interview with Hoest, he really dresses and acts like one of those dudes.
In collapsing the distinction between North and West without surrendering their black metal soul, Taake are following the same path as Iceland’s Sólstafir, but they’re treading it in a completely different way. Sólstafir’s 2009 masterpiece Köld is a fully realized synthesis of heathen black metal and gothic outlaw rock. Noregs Vaapen, on the other hand, is a straight-ahead melodic black metal album that—somehow—organically incorporates greasy blues-based riffage, authentic country music, and even a few hints of Ennio Morricone. Where Sólstafir channel the loneliness and grim fatalism of the Viking cowboy, Taake awaken us to his brawny, swaggering bravado and big-hearted joy. That becomes clear just under two minutes into the first track, Fra Vadestet Til Vaandesmed, when an eerie harmonized tremolo melody shifts from its minor scale into a blues scale, and then seamlessly gives way to a brawling redneck Hellhammer riff. It doesn’t sound schizophrenic, it sounds fuckin’ sick. Again and again, musical worlds are fused in the most unexpected way. Despite its lighthearted title, Du Ville Ville Vestland begins with a yearning, heart-wrenching black metal melody that weaves sorrow and ecstasy into one, before opening up into a rip-roaring tour of the noble fjords and forests. The following track, Myr, may actually be the grimmest on the album, and yet it features a ripping, climactic BANJO SOLO. But while the banjo adds a certain rustic charm, it doesn’t detract from the grim at all—pay attention to the way it works with the aggressive guitars underneath, and it takes on a darker color. Think O Brother, Where Art Thou if it were about a band of hapless adventurers escaping from the lair of a sadistic, man-eating frost giant. Jokes aside, though, it doesn’t sound like a joke at all — it sounds beautiful.
Hoest’s ability to juggle such seeming contrasts in tone without surrendering the power and cohesiveness of his music is one of his greatest strengths as a songwriter. He’s able to do this because he treats his influences with great respect, refusing to reduce blues-rock and country to the cliché of rowdy good-times music, just as he’s always refused to reduce black metal to the cliché of dissonant misanthropic noise. He understands each genre in the fullness of its musical and emotional potential, and that allows him to find fertile common ground where most would find only comedy.
Americans have dismissed the Scandinavian scene as “backward,” but this is more genuinely fresh and inventive than anything I’ve heard from the United States lately. First and foremost, it’s that inimitable and totally authentic feeling. It’s Hoest’s wild syncretic vision, and the masterful songcraft that’s allowed him to realize it. Even in the riffs themselves, though, he takes the Second Wave tradition to exciting and unexplored places. Hoest sometimes twists riffs back on themselves like rounds, sometimes shifts their harmonic character halfway through, and often creates wholly new riff structures by changing chords in unconventional places (and at just the perfect time). Throughout the album, I hear things that make me gape in amazement. He’s certainly enlivened black metal by incorporating outside influences, but he’s also expanded the genre’s formal possibilities from within.
When I listen to Noregs Vaapen I clench my fists in triumph and send my soul soaring over Norway. This is true black metal. This is true Romanticism. And it is also badass, ballsy frontier music. Taake have almost certainly written the best black metal album of the year.
– Pavel Godfrey
Taake official WWW: http://taake.svartekunst.no
Taake on DeadSpace: http://www.myspace.com/taakeofficial
Candlelight Records: http://www.candlelightrecords.co.uk
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