Beats and yelling: Gnipahålan

Folkstorm
Out 25^th December on Purity Through Fire

With a release schedule as adversarial as its nature, a lot of black metal tends to come out in the latter half of December. As if to disrupt pundits keen on tying up their AOTY lists before Christmas. Gnipahålan, as a shamelessly traditional, lavish, opulent, overwhelmingly cacophonous outlier of late Swedish black metal, see no reason not to release albums on our kid Jesus’s birthday. In this case, their actual second album that was supposed to come out in 2016 but never saw the light of day until now.

The key to this artist, and why I believe they are distinct from garden variety black metal on auto pilot despite being indistinguishable from them in material terms, is just how intense everything is. There is no let up on a Gnipahålan album, and this early example is no exception, despite the production having perhaps a slightly more limited range. Many bands claim extremity in one direction or another. Many end up sounding the same. Gnipahålan require a discerning ear to tell them apart from this crowd. They live the rhetoric in ways more subtle yet more gauche than their peers.  

At first glance an unbridled wash of noise. But digging deeper reveals a jagged melodicism rented from Burzum, early Darkthrone, lashed together with no small amount of early Emperor riffing thrown in for good measure. The symphonics are dialled way past what any widely available stereo system is capable of capturing. The speakers appear to be cutting out the limits at either end of the mix because the sound is so full of stuff, an excess of texture, layers, and activity to the extent that portions of it lurk outside the human or technological perceptual range.

Symphonically more basic than early Emperor. The keyboards lines rarely reach beyond a mere harmonic accompaniment to the guitars. In this they differ most strikingly from their Norwegian forebears. The guitar lines themselves are a blend of early Burzum, and Darkthrone circa ‘Under a Funeral Moon’, although Gnipahålan are much more comfortable foregrounding a cliched gothic horror orientation to many of the melodic throughlines. This element, largely borrowed from classic mid-20^th Century horror films, was always a subtext in second wave black metal certainly, openly acknoweldged as as key influence by Ihsahn himself. But Gnipahålan insist on bringing it to the fore, concluding otherwise ethereal guitar lines with surprisingly cheesy resolutions that – in the context of this overly compressed, dense, washed out mix – seem to ground the music in spite of itself.

Drums attempt to anchor all this surplus activity with simple mid-paced blast-beats or galloping, driving rhythms, again inviting comparisons to early Burzum. But like most other things about this album, this is ultimately a mere textural device, bookmarking moments of greater intensity alongside spacious breakdowns instead of providing a coherent rhythmic compass. From this perspective, one way of looking at this artist is as a neat companion piece to Ukrainian black metal, equally indebted to Burzum, but running in the opposite direction toward minimalism and austerity.

Despite the fact that ‘Folkstorm’ – like any Gnipahålan album – is an embarrassment of riches as far as the sheer quantity of textural layers are concerned, the activity of the riffs beneath this array is worth paying attention to. Unoriginal yes, but never uninteresting, never coming across as an afterthought, always well sculpted and fleshed out. But ultimately it’s that interaction of highly familiar black metal furniture combined with a degree of ornamentation and extravagance an order of magnitude above what the nearest competition is working with that makes this such a compelling artist.