Beats and yelling: Marthe and administering the punk/metal border

Further in Evil
Out 20th October on Southern Lord Recordings

Scene scribes have a habit of comparing music that is with music they think ought to be. Through every review, critique, and dissected minutia, they are forever trying to articulate a vision of music as they think it should be. From this angle, the actual work before us will always fall short of this vision of sonic perfection. As a result, reviews become hazy polemics spelling out how the actually existing release before us fall short in some way. ‘Further in Evil’ is the realisation of how I always felt the legacy of Bathory could or should be built on, but was never able to frame this desire with words. At the lighter end of barbaric metal, Marthe’s concoction of Viking era Bathory worship bleeds seamlessly into loose psychedelia, midwifed by grandiose Candlemass pretentions.

Her debut EP landed on my desk from Caligari Records back in the sweltering crucible of summer of 2020, a distant fever dream from today’s vantage point. Although ‘Sisters of Darkness’ was originally released in 2019, the story behind its production spoke profoundly to our lockdown selves. An informal hobby taking on a life of its own. An amateurism running deeper than mere affectation, a clumsy DIY ethos born of inconvenient necessity as opposed to kitsch. Entirely self-recorded and produced in her flat, the vocals were performed in whispered outbursts so as not to attract noise complaints, with multiple tracks layered one on top of the other, creating a haunted restraint which cloaked these fragments of epic, linear heavy metal in a veil of opacity.

Three years on, Marthe’s debut LP ‘Further in Evil’ allows us to test run her vision in a studio environment. Despite the professionalism of the mix, it respects the artisanal process behind the magic of the EP whilst creating room for Marthe to spread her wings in escalating degrees of ambition as far as landscaping and presentation are concerned. The album straddles the borders of punk and metal, harnessing the frugal activism of the former with the mysticism and grandiose cinema of the latter. The marching, mid-paced epicism of Bathory is grounded at one end by a low-end doom metal throb, allowing an intoxicated haze to creep into the corners. Equally the grounded realism of an early crust punk influence finds an earthy spiritualism thanks to the panoramic vantage point afforded by the longform construction.  

It’s Marthe’s ability to administer the intersection between grassroots accessibility and narrative epic that makes this such a refreshing experience for the modern ear, one perhaps all too accustomed to cluttered conceptual framing and overly-theorised musical clutter. This is barbaric metal. Weaponized simplicity. A considered rumination on mysticism. An active experience of music in motion from which arise peripheral spectres of our intoxicated selves. A cross section of our psychology at its most primal. Emergent moments of vitalism bring lucidity to a course of action once obfuscated.

This duality extends through the guitars via the dirty bluntness of power chord driven riffs contrasted against the piercing howl of lead material, all the way through to the vocals as they lurch between aggressive barks of distorted rage to an ethereal, almost ritualistic crooning, sweeping the music up into triumphant finales of stirring resolution.  

‘Further in Evil’ slots into a tradition of linear composition within metal. Whilst typically associated with heavy metal or an early black metal stock that melded Wagnerian operatics with raw punk immediacy, this ethos can also be located within certain branches of death metal and obviously doom metal. Whilst inexactness abounds, we could roughly theorise that what defines the linear metal style is a transparency of composition. The music is blunt, simple, sparse, uncluttered, there is room for technical proficiency but only if it adheres to the strict requirements of efficiency. One can mentally piece together each element with ease regardless of musical background. Themes rarely play out simultaneously, no complex interchange of micro-fragments, tangents, deviations, or contrapuntal interplay.

The task for anyone working within such an environment – one that looks, on paper, to be frustratingly restricted – is to create space for meaning to grow out of the constructive process. How does each basic element flow into the next? How do these elements in turn compound on one other over the course of a track? Do they build to something? Is there an overarching telos dictating the deployment and delivery of the riffs? Marthe answers all of these questions in the affirmative, arriving with a debut album that refreshes the landscape of what metal in its purest form can look like in 2023. The ground floor of this album’s execution may be accessible, but an expansive universe of esoterica unfurls atop the unassuming façade.