prozak
February 3rd, 2005, 06:38 PM
Capricornus - Alone Against All (2004)
No story of this band would fail to include the inevitable historical
mention, which is that Capricornus is the former drummer for
Graveland, famed for playing beats "backward" in a phrase such that
emphasis was no longer based on expectation of a concluding offbeat
but continuity of a pattern picked up on the offbeat. This
de-emphasized drumming as a rhythmic lead instrument, and reduced it
to capacity of uniform timekeeper, letting Graveland write longer riff
phrases. Some years later, Capricornus is with his own band writing in
the style that Absurd made into a functional subgenre of black metal,
NSBM, which is a hybrid of violent bouncy hardcore oi and flowing,
droning black metal. On this release, he both gets closer to the norm
and farther away from it by making music which takes oi smoothly into
metal with black metal applied as technique, but aims to reduce the
style to an almost transparent container for simple melodies and
basic, setting-and-journey song structures. Many of these have the
lushness of melodic descent, matching cadence to broadening intervals
in downward progression, that marked Summoning and Graveland, using
featuring chiastic structures changing on a 4/4 beat over some kind of
erratic background harmony; however, there's also plenty of influence
from fifteen different shades of punk music and older metal genres.
Luckily, Capricornus finds his own style and invents new types of
riffs to introduce and transition his material. Many of these fast
strumming riffs in basic form, matched to trudging cadence with
keyboards glimpsed in the background, are reminiscent of first album
Gehenna, while others are more evocative of Graveland, but it makes
more sense to place them in a musical genre that spans from early punk
through the end days of black metal. In this light, this music
reintroduces black metal as a style to an amalgamation of genres, or
rather, an essential element to all loud and simple popular
underground music; this black metal influence colors the tones used,
which makes this album Romantic and inscrutable in its darkness, with
the energy of a good oi band. In turn, this allows Capricornus to
avoid the boring and dogmatic ranting of most political bands, and
instead of telling us what to think, he shows us a world and lets our
own minds find values that could embrace both this darkness and a
light at the end of the tunnel.
http://www.anus.com/metal/zine/death_metal/issue7.txt
[ The cover art on this album is stupid; most black metal post-1996 is garbage. The music however is quite good. ]
No story of this band would fail to include the inevitable historical
mention, which is that Capricornus is the former drummer for
Graveland, famed for playing beats "backward" in a phrase such that
emphasis was no longer based on expectation of a concluding offbeat
but continuity of a pattern picked up on the offbeat. This
de-emphasized drumming as a rhythmic lead instrument, and reduced it
to capacity of uniform timekeeper, letting Graveland write longer riff
phrases. Some years later, Capricornus is with his own band writing in
the style that Absurd made into a functional subgenre of black metal,
NSBM, which is a hybrid of violent bouncy hardcore oi and flowing,
droning black metal. On this release, he both gets closer to the norm
and farther away from it by making music which takes oi smoothly into
metal with black metal applied as technique, but aims to reduce the
style to an almost transparent container for simple melodies and
basic, setting-and-journey song structures. Many of these have the
lushness of melodic descent, matching cadence to broadening intervals
in downward progression, that marked Summoning and Graveland, using
featuring chiastic structures changing on a 4/4 beat over some kind of
erratic background harmony; however, there's also plenty of influence
from fifteen different shades of punk music and older metal genres.
Luckily, Capricornus finds his own style and invents new types of
riffs to introduce and transition his material. Many of these fast
strumming riffs in basic form, matched to trudging cadence with
keyboards glimpsed in the background, are reminiscent of first album
Gehenna, while others are more evocative of Graveland, but it makes
more sense to place them in a musical genre that spans from early punk
through the end days of black metal. In this light, this music
reintroduces black metal as a style to an amalgamation of genres, or
rather, an essential element to all loud and simple popular
underground music; this black metal influence colors the tones used,
which makes this album Romantic and inscrutable in its darkness, with
the energy of a good oi band. In turn, this allows Capricornus to
avoid the boring and dogmatic ranting of most political bands, and
instead of telling us what to think, he shows us a world and lets our
own minds find values that could embrace both this darkness and a
light at the end of the tunnel.
http://www.anus.com/metal/zine/death_metal/issue7.txt
[ The cover art on this album is stupid; most black metal post-1996 is garbage. The music however is quite good. ]