Beats and yelling: what’re Krieg for?

Ruiner
Out 13th October on Profound Lore Records

2023 has seen an odd convergence of USBM old guard return to the fray. Demoncy, Profanatica, and now Krieg all seem keen to re-establish their relevance over a scene that has long since expanded beyond an underground that nurtured them. At the time Krieg formed in the late 1990s, black metal was something of a joke Stateside, but Jameson perhaps more than any other individual was instrumental in elevating it to a degree of respectability, more through his role as scene scribe, archiver, and networker than through the creative vehicle known as Krieg.

The reason for this is common to many artists that achieve cult status by virtue of their outrageously amateur beginnings. All these years on, his early work is still striking for its youthful clunk, inexperience, and aching vulnerability, even by the standards of black metal. Despite swearing off his early output, Jameson’s later work perhaps suffers from a professionalism that smothered a distinctive voice from materialising despite the obvious improvements in musicianship and production.

To trace this decline, we could perhaps divide Krieg’s career into roughly three eras. The first covers the turn of the century albums ‘Rise of the Imperial Hordes’ and ‘Destruction Ritual’, products of quintessential American youth, sloppy to the point of avant-garde, devoid of charm, running on fumes of directionless rage and now disavowed by Jameson himself. The second period is every bit as messy philosophically speaking, but there is a clear and not unsuccessful attempt to harness this unchecked rage into a vision of black metal as a vehicle for expressing urbanist isolation, a refined yet primal parallel to the naturalism of European bands. Covering the watershed ‘The Black House’ LP through to 2006’s ‘Blue Miasma’, this period was also marked by a slew of EPs with names like ‘Patrick Bateman’ or ‘Kill Yourself or Someone You Love’, evincing a fascination for violence punctuated by a pointedly vulgar verbal tradition unique to the US.

The final and current phase attempts to synthesise the first two eras with the strain of atmospheric post metal developed in the US. This saw Krieg become an unlikely focal point for a reconciliation between black metal’s core voter and the new generation of cultural appropriaters to emerge from Brooklyn, San Fransisco, and Shoreditch. 2010’s ‘The Isolationist’ achieves a rather convincing vision of what this might look like, folding the competing drives of post-2000 black metal into an uneasy alliance with each other.

The expression of violence as a total loss of control is there, a holdover from the first two albums, here tempered by distinctively urbanist atmospheric qualities which lend an unsettling artificiality to music no less ethereal. However, Jameson overplayed his hand with the follow up ‘Transient’ in 2014, which attempted a similar balance but ended in a current of bouncy edgelord pop rock. Despite the near decade gap between this and Krieg’s latest offering (again punctuated by a churn of splits and other miscellany), ‘Ruiner’ fits neatly into this third era as far as form and content go.

What to make of it? Jameson has always struck me as a fan first, artist second. He has kept his finger on the pulse of USBM for many years now, is a passionate record collector, occasional scribe, respected scene elder, and talented networker, earning him a notoriety beyond metal circles.

Despite being the project he’s most known for, Krieg is somewhat incidental to this extracurricular activity. It’s never quite clear what he wants to get out of it, or what we as listeners are supposed find here. The output up to and including ‘The Isolationist’ offers brief glimpses of an artistic statement lurking beneath the clutter. An expression of potent rage, a stripped back atmosphere granting room for guitar noise to compound on itself into a restrictive, cloying space unusual for black metal. Through its use of black metal as a vehicle for expressing profound mental agony, Krieg offered a hint of an alternative vision to what DSBM could have been in more creative hands.

But such hints never found expressive fruition. And Krieg lacked an identity remotely comparable to Jameson’s contemporaries. He is a master of vibecraft, concocting profoundly resonant statements of American nihilism through the medium of black metal. But this characterisation stretches only as far as delivery and performance. Compositionally speaking Krieg has no identity to speak of. When distinctive riffs and melodies are forthcoming, Jameson disappears into his influences, whether that be crust punk, post rock, or the later crop of USBM bands transposing black metal’s textural format into the language of conventional pop-rock harmonies.

‘Ruiner’ is no exception here. There are flashes of freeform rage and hyperbolic despair scattered throughout. But for the most part we get a state of the union address from Jameson born of his extensive experience within the scene, using other artists as his mouthpiece. Krieg was always primarily an atmospheric endeavour, a way to do ambient black metal through an alternative language to other artists occupying this space. The rage fuelled blasts of abrasive fury stripped any structure back to non-existence, leaving nothing but expressive content.

But ‘Ruiner’ is predominantly an album of compositions as opposed to vibes. This counterintuitively means that in attempting to sharpen up the songwriting, Krieg loses its identity beneath a collection of mouthpieces lifted from other artists. The vision on this album gets no further than a survey of the current and historic landscape of black metal. And whilst adding compositional meat to the bones would usually be cause for praise, the fact that Jameson never refined a distinctive voice as a musician results in this album achieving very little beyond reminding us that Krieg exist and continue to claim some relevancy.