Beats and yelling: Sørgelig

Φθορά
Out 4^th October on Tragedy Productions

This may be purely anecdotal, but it feels like black metal’s popularity is waning. And that’s a good thing. Finally allowing the genre to catch its breath and take stock. Sure, there are still the Goliaths of the genre that suck out the oxygen whenever they choose to resurface. But at a grassroots level, things seem a bit freer, looser, spontaneous, dare we say creative. There’s nothing particularly revolutionary going on. And thanks to black metal’s easy accommodation of sensationalism and theatrics it remains vulnerable to whatever new fad is thrust upon it. But for the time being the genre’s holding pattern is fertilising some fairly decent releases.

One such being the latest efforts from Greece’s Sørgelig, who return to full length form for the first time in five years following 2019’s ‘We the Oblivious’. ‘Φθορά’ picks up where Gorgoroth left off after ‘Under the Sign of Hell’, furnishing us with fast, melodic, ritualistically furious black metal. There’s nothing particularly new or esoteric in the formula, which is precisely why it works. It feels natural. Simple themes are explored with a degree of preoccupation rarely seen in this day and age, combined with a strict adherence to momentum, power, and galloping pace. There is an intentionality to the introduction of developmental material, either as a means of building to a finale or else to disrupt the flow of a piece.

Production is fairly polished by the standards of feral black metal of this calibre. This is necessary to give colour and nuance to Sørgelig’s riff driven style, allowing us to study the nuance of the rhythm guitar and the reasonably prominent bass. Drums serve their purpose well in driving the pieces forward without becoming a distraction, offering a fluid and intuitive interaction with the phrasing of the guitars.

The one aspect – as is so often the case – that some listeners may struggle to overlook are the vocals. Whilst the “default” setting seems to be a mid-ranged rasp, they are intentionally high in the mix, and liable to deviate into hysterical bursts utilising the entire arsenal of melodramatic affections, from spoken word, uncontrolled howling, hardcore barks, the list goes on.

Whilst this could be read as another after echo of classic era Gorgoroth – Pest himself was partial to switching up the vocals when it fit the moment – here the lily struggles under the weight of its gilding, with every track reaching for the top shelf in stakes and tension, to the point where it comes across as an attempt to prop up some of the album’s weaker moments (the black ‘n’ roll adjacent opening riff to ‘…Of Wrath and Pyre’ for example). That being said, the performance is strong and for the most fits the music well. Black metal fans are consummate masochists, well trained in compartmentalising any harbingers of poor taste. 

Whether the return of Sørgelig is an outlying piece of data or signs of a newfound confidence and freedom within black metal, I lack the statistics to say with certainty. But ‘Φθορά’ is a welcome return to the solid, unoriginal, swaggering fury of the latter days of the Norwegian scene, with a dash of character and unabashed theatrics thrown in for good measure.