Beats and yelling: Mütiilation

Pandemonium of Egregores
Out 26^th December on Osmose Productions

I’ll happily eat a hat or two if I made the wrong call, as it seems I did in writing off Meyhna’ch after the middle age tantrum that was ‘Black Metal Cult’. But the difference between an exceptional artist and a quite good one is the former’s ability to surprise. ‘Pandemonium of Egregores’, cheekily released while we were closed for Christmas, sees Mütiilation reassert themselves as a vital and interesting force in black metal, in spite of naysayers like me and with far more vigour than a lot of artists of a similar vintage.

Whilst 2024’s ‘Black Metal Cult’, the first album from this artist in nearly two decades, was not without merit, it smacked of an aging artist lamenting the direction of a genre they helped crystalise, and therefore lacked any musical focus beyond tokenistic abrasion and dissonance, an after echo of what the French scene was known for. Listening to the follow up feels like a second draft. Meyhna’ch is clearly still preoccupied with the subject of aging, and the changes he has witnessed on the music he loves over the years. But the focus is introspective, probing, befitting of an artist his age. The lyrics of the tellingly titled ‘Fifty Winters’ speak for themselves in this regard: “What did we learned at the end. Did we reach wisdom before the hole. Don’t confuse wisdom with weariness and believe it, there’s no joy to become old, you will see” (all typos retained for accuracy).

The lengthy tracks themselves evince a more rigid architecture. They toil in simple, two chord punk narrations, only to emerge into more open melodicism, charred by dissonance, and anarchic disruptions intended to be as alienating and illogical as possible, something that has always marked the French style out. The aforementioned ‘Fifty Winters’ adopts a lyrical, almost folk driven pacing offset by more cinematic passages, which in turn contrasts nicely with the naturalistic flow of the title track as it opens out the music into a landscape of simple but endlessly compelling melodic lines. It’s perhaps the most “typically” black metal material we have seen from this artist, but Mütiilation are not short on reminders of the histrionic, tragedian gothic fatalism that made their name. Offsetting the latent hopefulness of energetic tremolo runs with comedically glum descending guitar leads and eccentric vocalisations, all of which imbues the material with that sense of absurdist melodrama that the more reserved Nordic style shies away from.

On a technical level, the playing is tighter, the guitars at least feel like they’ve been tuned, the drums are locked into to consistent tempos, and transitions are fluid and deliberate even when they are designed to be as jarring as possible. Whilst this could be seen to negate the charm of this rawer iteration of black metal, it serves to bring to bear the narrative structure and wider artistic scope Mütiilation are going for here. Despite its aggressive abandon, almost painful vocal flexes, and contrasts between abstract dissonance and flowing realism, everything feels intentional, everything is placed where it is for a reason. Which might be the bear minimum for some artists, but given this album’s roots in a scene notorious for its sloppiness and one-take wonders it’s certainly worth noting.

From this intentionality it feels like we are finally given an insight into what this artist always wanted to express but could maybe never quite get across. After the halcyon days of the mid 90s, Mütiilation’s early 2000s output always felt like it was reaching for a more modernist, artistic, avant-garde statement of black metal in quiet rebuttal to the unapologetic vampirism of the earlier material. But all, despite their merits, fell short in some sense. Here, with a more diverse armoury of techniques, what feels like fewer inhibitions when it comes to expressing high emotions, and a more rigid focus on compositional coherence over a simple cache of tricks bundled together at random, it feels like a second version of Muttiilation after the days of ‘Remains of a Ruined, Dead, Cursed Soul’ is finally coming into sharper focus.