Pensées Nocturnes: Grotesque
Following the undermined success of Nocturnes’ debut album, we’re suddenly dropped Grotesque – a divergent follow up to an extraordinary debut. As per my initial review of the debut, I’m quite fond of the song writing applied ( atmospheric fallouts and immemorial aside ) and many of the classical nuances employed. He had a sense of style, of personal application with feeling and expression; something lacking severely in the black metal genre. None of it was very showy or clichéd, lacking the me-too persona and the idiosyncratic ploys found elsewhere. Grotesque is essentially his experimentation with sound and style, an avant-garde deployment from everything that made Vacuum so wonderfully unique and passionate.
Grotesque rings true to the name and cover it touts – unnatural miserablists wading through impatience, death, fragmented shivers of atmospheric revival and tension, stirring, exuberant overtures and creepy chamber interludes. The album oozes atmosphere in many of the ways Vacuum did, but on a much less effective level. Tracks are not built around chords, riffs, styles or moods. In fact the entire structure of the album really doesn’t expose itself until the fourth or fifth track. With the opening two/three tracks, we’re dragged into a shuffling audience, observing, from below. The band is up on stage between two medieval statues, set to the backdrop of a midfall festival. It’s cloudy, slightly pale, and the rain is withheld – momentarily. The crowd is this aggregation of inmates; diseased, copulating corpses. Graveyard poets. The band is stringing their instruments, the interlude protrudes. A soft, delicate ambiance breezes through the crowd, stricken with awe. Emotion permeates the air. All is silent. The crescendo explodes in an emphatic rupture – faces now ablaze with sincerity and passion. The track ends, the crowd erupts. These types of introductions are always so incredibly important to an album for setting the forthcoming tone. Stanley Kubrick once said the first ten minutes of a film are the most important, and the exact same rings true for music. Without an introduction, there is no album. Without that deployment of setting and soundscape, there really is no catalyst between listener and music. Thus far, Vaerohn is two for two with album interludes and mood derivation.
The second song ( and the third ) employs this disastrously dynamic structure between sound and ambiance, alternating his percussive nuances with this avant-garde blast beating. I guess it’s an interesting way to sort of explore the complexities of horror/neogothic soundscapes and his ( however tenuous ) orchestrated classical bits, but the way its strung together feels too loose. Both of these tracks build through this exhausting trudge of stop/go rhythms, classical acoustics, and rampant black metal, but nothing is ever very striking. The mood is stretched much too thinly – momentum with blasting diminished and castrated by interludes, interludes never really given their respect to indulge the listener. Too fleeting? Perhaps, but Vaerohn is never one to really deploy his atmosphere in a mood-driven way; most of his ambiance tends to be nothing more than a slight fervor, a moment of stillness that escapes itself. The fourth track brings about his exceptional talent for this fleeting ambiance, and is borderline DSBM – a striking melody, desperate vocals, a sense of complete submersion. It’s easily one of the finest tracks on the album.
The rest of the album sort of regurgitates the structure above – it’s less of a concept piece and more of a meditation on sound/style regression. There’s almost always a sort of moody ambiance floating about before, during, and after tracks ( sometimes bleeding into one another ), but it’s never really USED. That’s my biggest issue with this album. There’s so many wonderful experimental sounds gushing around the edges, but they’re only hinted at, merely suggested. On top of that, he attempts to snag just about everything surrounding his sound at once. There’s simply no structure to progress a track, it just bumps and grinds around to hit all of his doctored preconceptions; it almost becomes frustrating. Hel is the most guilty track of losing itself to its own notions of experimentation. It’s literally a repetition of the bm/ambiance/bm/ambiance/ambient bridge/bm/close structure. It’s ineffective and disgustingly dull.
In short, Grotesque is an album of innumerable and glaring downfalls, but one that presents nothing but an opportunity. I’m still awaiting Vaerohn’s masterpiece, and believe that, soon enough, and with enough patience with himself and his music, we’ll be brought an unrequited, monumental album of such unimaginable brilliance. If his debut is of any indication, his classical nuances are incredibly well rounded, as is, for the most part, his ability to conjure emotion and create the catalytic moodpieces necessary to delve the listener into the self. To explore. To explore the recreance conscious of thought. You’re almost there, Vaerohn.
