![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It wasn’t a giant leap, but it was a conscious one. Formed in 2000 by an artist calling himself Neige (née Stéphane Paut), Alcest were the first black metal band to not just overlap with shoegaze, but to actively incorporate elements of shoegaze. Perhaps Burzum’s most prominent descendant, though (prior to Deafheaven, anyway) is the French band Alcest. And Burzum very much gave birth to an entire genre of “pretty” metal bands - or, more conventionally, “atmospheric black metal” bands - from Drudkh to Negur? Bunget to Paysage d’Hiver to Winterfylleth to Russia’s Blazebirth Hall collective to Canada’s Metal Noir Québécois Patriotique scene to virtually all “Cascadian black metal bands” including Weakling, Wolves In The Throne Room, and Ash Borer. Even Burzum’s cover art is serene and lovely.Īlong with Darkthrone, Burzum literally defined black metal’s second wave: Most of the music we currently define as “black metal” can trace its aesthetic origins to one of those two bands (or one step further back to the first-wave/second-wave link, Mayhem). For all their structural qualities, these songs were as much ambient hum as they were “songs.” Burzum was hardly the first metal band to make pretty-sounding music, but Burzum was the first to make metal sound pretty in this particular way: like a pre-dawn ocean shoreline devoured by fog like a long walk through a snowstorm illuminated only by moonlight. Irrespective of which sounds better, the music produced by Burzum bore many qualities comparable if not identical to the music produced by shoegaze bands like Ride and My Bloody Valentine: Heavily distorted guitars churned behind walls of feedback and fuzz melodic chord progressions and mechanical-sounding rhythm tracks were repeated seemingly on an endless loop to hypnotic, sometimes hallucinatory effect vocals were buried in the back of the mix, till the human voice became an utterly disembodied thing, neither a voice nor human. But, you know, he’d cornered that market and I cornered this one. For the record, I think it’s better when it’s played with slow drums than the fast style. would do these melancholic riffs often at a slower pace I chose this fast pace to do them in. In a commentary track on the 2010 reissue of Darkthrone’s 1995 album Panzerfaust, that band’s drummer/spokesperson Fenriz admitted that both his band and Burzum - friends and collaborators, at the time - were doing little more than stealing riffs from Bathory, and then playing them at varying rhythms. Vikernes’ own blueprint was the monumental first-wave Swedish black metal band Bathory. When Varg Vikernes took on the Burzum handle in 1991, shoegaze was at its cultural apex in England, but it was not part of the vocabulary of Norwegian metal bands. Burzum was clearly a huge influence on Deafheaven the same way Hill Street Blues was an influence on The Wire: The early ancestors provided not so much a blueprint as an entirely new genus which evolved for decades before being adopted and adapted by these particular descendants. I’d probably go with “primogenitor” or “forebear” (which would have been both an apt word choice and a hilarious reference, although not for another two years). I’m not sure “blueprint” was the word he was looking for - it’s definitely not the word I would use to connect Burzum and Deafheaven. The interview included a word-association segment, and when presented with the word “Burzum,” Clarke responded: In February 2011, Brooklyn Vegan did an interview with Deafheaven frontman George Clarke - only a year after the formation of his band, more than two years before their world-devouring Sunbather, still two months before the release of their debut LP, Roads To Judah. ![]()
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