MORT

Perhaps the purpose of this album is to frighten rather than entertain. At the risk of sounding trite, I'll just comment that the dissonance, disconcerting atmosphere, and subtle growling would make this a great soundtrack for a gory horror flick. Even if the album succeeds in this regard, it really is almost fifty minutes of the same thing, and despite the track divisions, really functions as one continual piece.

"Chapter I" Murky tones and disquieting echoes make for an unsettling listening experience.

"Chapter II" The second track continues with the gloomy sounds and sludgy sound, maintaining a moderate tempo throughout.

"Chapter III" Once again, a sinister ambience bridges the tracks. This time, the drumming is more rapid, if still subdued in terms of volume, the guitars are an oozing wall of sound, and the lead guitar seems to be playing out of tune.

"Chapter IV" This track is, of course, more of the same, but relies more heavily on snarling yet whispering vocals.

"Chapter V" If modern-day King Crimson played doom metal, it would sound like this, as there is some rather intriguing Robert Fripp-like lead involved. Faintly, some semblance of clean vocals emerge.

"Chapter VI" Distant percussion and droning guitar produce a hypnotic yet simultaneously annoying piece. It evolves (devolves?) into a messy yet steady onslaught of noise and petrifying sounds.

"Chapter VII" An atonal guitar lead runs over blasts of sound, and provides a foundation for some ugly growling. However, it does become something slightly more interesting as it progresses, even though the overall mood doesn't change very much.

"Chapter VIII" The final and longest track opens with more science fiction-like vocals, and predictably, bursts into strident guitars and outlying drums. Unbelievably, it is more horrific than anything that came before.

One of the more polarizing metal albums I've come across, MoRT is one hell of a dissonant affair that's alternatively punishing and mesmerizing. Far removed from what the band were doing a decade before, Blut Aus Nord aim for a cold industrial tone draped by numerous deranged melodies and inhuman vocals that blend in with the guitar patterns to form an uncomfortable aura.

Unlike the sort of black metal albums that attempt to capture an air of forests in winter and howling winds of the North, MoRT aims for a more urban affair, like the darkest alleyways in the seediest corners of a dark and cold metropolis, and as an atmospheric piece it succeeds. This album is wretched, but quite enthralling. Creepy ambient passages give way to delirious chord and single note guitar patterns that are actually complex and nowhere near easy to reproduce. Sometimes it does sound like musical instruments hemorrhaging, but there will always be eerily beautiful patterns to follow them, while still remaining more than a little askew. "Chapter IV" even boasts an unusually gorgeous solo over these warped riffs that shows awareness and well thought out progressions rather than just unbridled lunacy. "Chapter V" is probably the most well-rounded number, comprising most of this albums best aspects in a single song, with even room for a bit of consonant melody to shake things up.

What will turn off some listeners is the similarities between songs, as the album plays better as an atmospheric whole, which can become tedious or stomach-turning after a while depending on what you had eaten that day. I find the music borderline fascinating as this dreary horrid ride through foggy city streets littered with trash and general dilapidation, but it's certainly not for everyone, as the tempos remain almost plodding, eschewing the more typical frenetic speeds of black metal acts, and the vocals, buried in the mix are hardly decipherable. If the running time were any longer, it would actually begin to be more of an annoyance than a nightmare.

Yet I think it's alright. Not as something I would play all that often, but when the conditions are right this is one strange and chilling journey. Vindsval really went all out here, much to the chagrin of a decent portion of fans of Blut Aus Nord's early work, but to the benefit of nutjobs that can deal with such an odd form of loud music.

Whereas Blut Aus Nord's preceding album to this, The Work Which Transforms God, presented a series of compositions that juxtaposed dark industrial ambient sections with eruptions of black metal fury, here they take their experiment further. On MoRT, just as the distinctions between tracks break down (each reduced to a single chapter in one massive piece), so too does the distinction between the black metal, industrial, and ambient aspects of the group's sound, yielding a unique sonic landscape through which tormented vocals in the style of Tibetan throat singing warble.

It certainly isn't for everyone, and it's no surprise that people have an extreme reaction to it one way or another, but for my money it's one of the most rewarding sonic experiments arising from the black metal scene I have heard.

While second wave of black metal was without a doubt the product of Norwegian wrath against humankind and religious practices with plenty of church burnings to add some visuals, the relative adaptive nature of the buzzsaw guitar led bombast and simple song structures allowed various elements to hybridize quite quickly making black metal one of the most versatile subgenera in the entire metal universe. While Darkthrone, Emperor, Immortal and Mayhem may have led Norway's darkened dramatic take on the 80s metal that evolved into the 90s, it became clear in the 2000s that France was taking the lead having created some of the most unique experimental examples of taking black metal into surreal new realities.

The one man band BLUT AUS NORD also known as Vindsval took the atmospheric black metal approach of Burzum and Naglfar and adopted some of the first traces of psychedelic rock as far back as "Ultime Thulée" in 1995 but once the BLUT AUS NORD project became a fully fueled band beginning with 2003's "The Work Which Transforms God," Vindsval and friends took the black metal world by storm by crafting a new level of sophistication that had never been achieved with depressive chugging atonal guitar riffs enshrouded by suffocating atmospheres and crafting a sonicscape that reflected the frequencies of true hellish underworlds.

Three years later this Mondeville outfit took the stylistic approach on the breakthrough album to its logical conclusion with the fifth full-album MoRT which featured Vindsval on guitar and vocals along with bandmates W.D. Feld on drums and keyboards and GhÖst on bass. The album which pretty much was a continuous flow of bleak mind-numbing surreality which featured eight tracks symbolizing a "Chapter" of a greater nebulous concept never quite defined. The overall mood of the album is terrorizing as MoRT allows you to enter a strange new world where nothing is familiar and excels in atonal deformity unlike anything else that has been experienced before or after.

Beginning with terrifying processed vocals and dark ambient swirls, the atonal amorphous guitar riffs swim in a gelatinous vacuum with abstract drum beats, dissonant swells of distortion and thick depressive atmospheres that sound like single musical notes are tortured until they cease to exude a life force. In many ways MoRT exudes the absolute perfect fusion of black metal textural sensibilities with icy dark ambient atmospherics crafting a perfect balance of calculated metrics. Twisted progressive time signatures slink and slither like magically enhanced serpents writhing out of cold fiery pits in the bowels of the deepest recesses of the underworld, a place so devoid of light and human tangibility that one is reduced to a spiritual cryogenic state of the soul.

Perhaps one of the most adventurous black metal experiences one could possibly encounter, it's fair to say that BLUT AUS NORD changed the black metal world exponentially with "The Work Which Transforms God" and this even more bizarre example of MoRT which would apparently shift the tectonic plates leading many other French black metal bands like Deathspell Omega and S.V.E.S.T. to adopt some of the deranged harsh tactics employed on this sonic display of freakery. Perhaps the least metal of BLUT AUS NORD's canon, MoRT excels at being utterly outside the boundaries of virtually anything orthodox in any musical genre. The processed unintelligible vocals that erupt occasionally only add an emphatic sense of horror to the incessant parade of soul splitting awe that lasts for 47 minutes of sonic terror.

Needless to say, MoRT is unlike any other musical experience you could imagine existed and is perhaps one of the most terrifying albums that has ever been produced. Taking on aspects of black metal, dark ambient, progressive rock and even freeform no wave accompanied by a series of deep processed otherworldly growls and the occasional liturgical choirs peaking out of the din, MoRT is without a doubt one that will disturb even the most hardened music lover upon first listen and will send any uninitiated passerby to the insane asylum. This music requires learning an entirely new language in many ways to comprehend as it craftily displays some of the most extreme possibilities of a black-metal-in-opposition approach. While BLUT AUS NORD has crafted some excellent albums in its multi-decade career, it's this one MoRT that i find the most original and utterly fascinating in its unapologetic experimental rampage.