Something is stirring in Germany. The land of poets and thinkers, that produced Beethoven, Bach, Wagner, Mozart and Wigrid, is maintaining its tradition of artistic innovation with two relative newcomers, Unru and Sun Worship, who are both pushing the boundaries of modern black metal. Here both bands offer a track each of long-form sonic violence that extends the conventional ideas of black metal sound while staying completely true to the form’s original mantra: to be the aural manifestation of negativity, grief, despair, primality, and extremity.
Unru hew closest to traditional black metal, with relatively lo-fi production, tremolo-picked guitars and blast beats aplenty, on their almost ten minute offering “Von der Flüchtigkeit des Todes” (which translates to “On the Volatility of Death”), but mix it up with passages of haunting ambience and sonic experimentation. The blast beats fade and the drums slow into almost tribal patterns that roil and surge beneath swirls of tape hiss and reverb-drenched feedback; ethereal, almost non-existent leads circulate in the background like the echoing calls of long-gone birds in an impenetrable fog; and the hoarse barks and black metal shrieks devolve into moans and ghostly wails that echo and then fade into nothing. It is a long way from and yet a natural extension of their previous, much shorter, recordings, dialling down the crust influence that permeated their demo and absorbing the ambient interludes into the rest of the music, creating a single, all-encompassing piece that is longer by more than double than any track they’ve produced in the past, a piece that ebbs and surges in movements that feel as organic as the tides.
Sun Worship come at atmospheric black metal from a different side on their twelve minute contribution “Remembrance”, with a clearer production and a more orchestrated attack that recalls the “post” black metal leanings of bands like Krallice, Ash Borer and even some of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s more recent recordings. Where Unru built atmosphere through lo-fi sonics and ambient distortion, Sun Worship create an almost impressionistic haze through the post-rock-esque layering of multiple varied guitar parts. Cascading tremolo-picked lines move with, across, over and under one another in a way that is hard to navigate or pin down, but that works to create a symphonic whole that is melodic, evocative and poignant, and accompanied by enough hammering blast beats and death rattle cries to ensure that none of the complexity and coordination has robbed this music of any of its primal brutality.
Unru and Sun Worship are two sides of the same coin and yet worlds apart in their approaches, illustrating the diversity and creativity that are possible in a form that can so often risk falling back on fundamentals.
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