Starting the metal portion of this blog with one of the most obscure, inaccessible records I know and love - yup, sounds like a good idea to me. France's DRAKONHAIL is a one-man band that specializes in some of the most extreme funeral doom / atmospheric black metal I've ever heard, and I've heard a lot of (shitty) funeral doom. This album (first released in 2004 but re-released in 2007) is heavy and it is slow, seriously really fucking slow. (One of the songs averages about 25 drum beats a minute.)
Before I talk about why this album is so satisfying to me, I'd like to give a little primer on its genre / how and why it exists in this form. The foundation of L'Ombre du Neant's sound is built on a number of very specific stylistic tropes and ideals made in the intersection of like 3 different genres. On one hand, you've got the growled vocals, dark aesthetic, and misanthropic lyrics/song titles that you would get from just about any metal band; then you've got the cold repetitive riffs, purposely inaccessible/discordant/all around busted production quality of most black metal bands; on top of that you've got the ridiculously slow tempo and eerie ambient-esque atmosphere that funeral doom employs. Add all of that into a French pot and record it with a 1990s cassette microphone from two rooms over and you've got this album.
You may be thinking: why in the hell would anyone want to listen to an album that sounds like a noisy, incomprehensible pile of shit? Let alone pay money for it? To be honest I don't have much of an answer beyond a simple "it feels good".
The kind of music Drakonhail makes here is, to put it simply, the kind of music you listen to when you feel as shitty as the music sounds. It feels murky and inhospitable. The cold, unending riffs as well as their distant and echo-filled quality evokes a dreamy (or perhaps nightmarish?) feeling, like one is lost in a crushing void, or trapped in a completely black dungeon, or wandering around an unending purgatory - and they do it all by basically recycling the same 4 or 5 notes for minutes on end, I don't even know if I can call that riffing! The vocals amble about, rising and falling like shadows of haunted souls screaming in agony and loneliness. (By the way - no - you aren't supposed to be able to understand them... think of them as just another instrument!) There is no pleasure here, no hope, no real enjoyment, only depressive nostalgia, the eternal trudging forward, the agonized wailing of a silent soul, the unbearably heavy burden of one's sorrows. That is funeral doom.
What makes Drakonhail special is how hard he drives the techniques and the very visceral effects it can have on the listener. No bullshit, this album depresses the fuck out of me, and I think it's both beautiful and very powerful. The songs on here drag; the riffs and the stupid slow drums just keep droning on and on, and the piercing vocals scream with such real pain and frustration and even hatred that I find myself feeling the exact same thing. It's all very satisfying, and once you acquire a taste for it, you find yourself absolutely enthralled with the heaviness of all the moving parts, hypnotized by the uniqueness and the beauty in the otherwise abrasive sounds. There's just nothing else that sounds like this.
Drakonhail has plenty of other demos and albums floating around, but this is the album that speaks to me the most - and also the only one I've managed to find a great rip from. That's another thing I love about this niche of black metal; releases are so rare and limited that it really feels like an accomplishment to find a release that is great and has the perfect balance of sounding like shit and still sounding good.
Most of you probably won't enjoy this album, but I hope you give it a try. If even one person can read what I'm writing and feel something of the same way - or something else completely different, but equally positive - I'll have done something good today.
DREAM...
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