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Show No Mercy

Show No Mercy

Show No Mercy

The Month In: Metal

by Brandon Stosuy, posted June 28, 2006
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Newsworthy? Not really...but it has to be mentioned that the past year's seen metal's cache rise in the mainstream press. There're plenty of examples of the crossover (ahem), though perhaps none as startling and weirdly cool as a recent New York Times Magazine feature on Sunn 0))), Boris, and Southern Lord, the label operated by Sunn 0)))'s Greg Anderson.

As regular Aquarius Records clients know, those crews are just the tip of a very blackened, pre-ozone effect iceberg (and Boris aren't even really metal at this point); but as would be expected, plenty of hard-liners see additional column space of any sort as a panic-inducing death knell.

Actually, because I'm not employed by Terrorizer or Decibal, I've been implicated as one of the metal murderers. In his lengthy, "False Metal: The Financial and Farcical Return of Heavy Metal", for instance, Dave Burns calls me out for a piece I wrote in Slate last summer. The offense? Publishing an article about Sunn 0))), Isis, Deathspell Omega, Mastodon, Leviathan, Boris, Opeth, and Dillinger Escape Plan, among others, in a publication that isn't Metal Edge. Oh well-- as corpsepainted tears patter against my Gorgoroth-spiked arms bands, I remind myself I gotta stay strong.

That said, welcome to "Show No Mercy", a column titled after Slayer's 1983 debut album as well as my Iron Maiden-loving friend's black Scottish terrier. It'll be a monthly look at underground and overground metal, providing the soapbox I've wanted since sorta learning how to play "Peace Sells" on a no-name mall-bought guitar in 7th grade.

For the debut, the light show's focused on Chicago-area black metal quartet Nachtmystium, whose pummeling and elegantly bleak Instinct:Decay is one of the best metal albums of the year. (I anticipate Xasthur's forthcoming Subliminal Genocide will give it a run for its money. And, well, this new Striborg's doin' the trick...)

Speaking of Xasthur, though, Nachtmystium's fronted by Azentrius, aka Blake Judd, a member of the wonderfully dank and fuzzed post-Burzum supergroup, Twilight, a quintet that also includes Malefic (Xasthur), Wrest (Leviathan), Imperial (Krieg), and Hildolf (Draugar). But, heck, if those other dudes are so shadowy, why am I calling Judd by his given name? "I gotta work away from it the whole pseudonym thing," he laughs. "It was something I came up with when I was 16 years old. We're still referring to ourselves with stage names, but at this point the mask's been taken off, and I don't need to hide behind some cheesy Dracula-sounding name I came up with in Driver's Ed."

Despite coming clean, Judd admits the change is bittersweet. "What always attracted me to this music is that it was kind of hidden," he says. "Now, with all this press, there's no mystique anymore-- as much as do I enjoy the press, I realize that we'll never have that mysterious aura that we had early on. Where you didn't know our names and didn't know what we did all day." (Of course, MySpace's self-promoting black metal minions should be blamed for this more than The New York Times.)

In addition to playing guitar and growling in Nachtmystium and Twilight, the 24-year-old runs Battle Kommand, a label with recent releases distributed through Southern Lord. Battle Kommand's output includes, among other things, work by Georgia-based doomsters Zoroaster, Krieg, the truly epic Ruins of Beverast, and a couple great splits: Sapthuran/Leviathan and Xasthur/Leviathan. He also released the subject at hand, the new Nachtmystium, one full-on motherfucker.

If Judd's decision to use his real name seems significant, well, Instinct:Decay's expansive sound is revelatory: From the scraping shutter of the ambient opening track, "Instinct", to the wonderful anthemic pummel and regal acoustic interludes of "A Seed For Suffering", it's clear Nachtmystium's third full-length is kick-starting a new stage for the band (and perhaps a new psychedelic black metal movement?). Though there's a tune called "The Antichrist Messiah", Blake tells me the libretto is more personal and down-to-earth than in the past. He briefly mentions George W. Bush, for example, and global politics, but doesn't explicitly link the libretto to that realm. "It's my representation of what I've seen from the more negative side of life over the past couple of years," he says. "It's a lot more real: There's no fantasy, there's no anti-Christian shit. It's not cartoonish. We're trying to go deeper than that."

No worries-- they haven't gone Rage on us. It's difficult to make out what he's saying, but lines like "I want to be the hands around your throat/ And to look into your eyes when you stop seeing" are stitched inside the cover art, and ostensibly remain a part of the vocabulary. There are also those gorgeous gestural moments we've come to expect from solid metal: guttural Celtic Frost exclamations, a Judas Priest holla, mucous-heavy spit globules at the end of "Chosen By No One".

Recorded on two linked ("rigged") 8-track machines and mastered by Scott Hull of Pig Destroyer and Agoraphobic Nosebleed (who also mastered Twighlight's 2005 self-titled debut), Instinct:Decay is a killer sonic leap from the the lower-fidelity black metal of 2004's Eulogy IV and Demise and 2002's Reign of the Malicious and self-titled EP, etc. Shredded vocals and guitars remain, but check the especially hot-shit E-bow use, synthesizers (they mention listening to Pink Floyd in the one sheet), noise fragments, catchy thrashisms, and space-rock sling-shots clinging to freak-out walls-of-sound. It seems this is just the beginning.

The material for a forthcoming split with Leviathan will possibly be recorded at Rancho de la Luna, the Joshua Tree studio where Queens of the Stone Age put their sounds to tape. Judd points out that the studio's analog before going on to say there are limitations with his current recording set-up and he'd like to expand Nachtmystium's sound and increase the tracking capabilities without having to record to Pro Tools. I agree: The music's icy and gloomy enough without resorting to digital-age slurpies.

All said, the extra details and bigger sounds are bound to bring more hep cats to the shows. Like, for instance, the dude who dissed Nachtmystium as Immortal-lite at Northsix in Brooklyn during a Sunn 0))) show a few months back. (I disagreed, but thought it was kinda cool he knew about Immortal.) Judd infamously put the guy down, calling him a "nigel hipster." Since then, the term's been blogged about, mentioned in a Pitchfork review by Zach Baron, and officially defined in Revolver. It's a fucking mini-phenom.

Still, in case I decide to create a Wikipedia entry, I figured I should ask the center of this media bubble. "Wrest gets credited for it, but it was actually Hildolf who came up with that," Judd laughs. "They work together in San Francisco. As you know, you've got all these hipsters there. These people he labeled 'nigels' have shaggy hair, really tight jeans. That's what we call this whole indie black metal scene: They're the nigels."

Before he can finish, of course, I'm already imagining Wrest and Hildolf kicking it co-worker style at Dunkin' Donuts.

Show No Mercy's headed to Norway in August for the Öya Festival. All black metal worthies should contact me with your whereabouts.

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