Some years ago, I was at a get-together off Graham street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. My friend had rare access to a backyard, and we all gathered around the grill holding drinks and basking in the warm, spring night after a brutal winter. One of the guys there was a professional jazz musician who was peripherally fascinated with extreme metal, but knew nothing about it. Another of my friends in attendance literally wrote the book on it. Carcass was playing on the stereo. The bass playing hipster asked the author what the difference was between death metal and black metal. The writer pointed towards the direction of the stereo. ‘That’s death metal,‘ he said. And then he pointed at the moon that was peeking from behind a wall of grey clouds. ‘That’s black metal.‘
That event seems like a lifetime ago, but it always stuck with me as one of the most on point descriptions of black metal I’d ever heard. Death metal was mired in reality: the cold, calculating dependency of electrons streaming through a series of wires. Death metal was precise, clinical, the temporary separating of an artery to bypass a dying heart before the heart was brutally ripped from the chest cavity, blood exploding in a cacophony of trajectories. It’s the sound of the villain’s laugh. It’s the premeditated murder, weapons of mass destruction in the shape of seven-string Jackson guitars and Gallien-Krueger amps the size of tanks.
Black metal, on the other hand, is about that pale, white orb circling the Earth. It’s about the clouds passing in front, filtering the reflected light from the sun onto a planet mired in misery, despair and violence. Black metal, even in spite of its Satanic roots, is more about accepting the fact that the darkest sides of humanity are the loudest. You can’t stop the noise, so you need to accept it, and in the best case scenario, you can escape it. Modern black metal is about that escape. Many bands have moved away from the corpse-painted, church-burning ideologies that darkened the original art-form in glorious ways to more paganistic, ambient depictions of life. This planet is shit, but there are still many beautiful places in which to escape the wretchedness of worldly woe.
Dutch band Ainsoph occupies one of these beautiful spaces, a speck of barren land amidst the smoldering destruction of a planet plummeting to the depths of psychological peril. Their music emanates a spiritual power and confidence that comes with the conflicting emotions of affection and vengeance, the two human emotions that give their full length debut its name. Coming five years after their promising EP Ω – V, a violent slab of post-rock influenced blackgaze, Affection & Vengeance finds a band at the top of its form, arms outstretched on an island of solitary confinement, the seas roiling and the atmosphere crackling with deadly energy. Ainsoph‘s music runs through an emotional gauntlet like an earthmover out of control, its highs and lows magnifying the human experience like a virus under an electron microscope.
Opener “Cowardice” starts with shimmering distorted guitars over a bed of strings. The arpeggiated riff gives way to I.V.’s ethereal vocals, drenched heavily in washes of reverb. ‘I should have died a thousand deaths,’ she pleas, the first line in album that tracks a tragic trajectory of pain and loss. ‘Wish I was ready for turbulence once again.’ I.V.’s empyreal and deceptively angelic vocals are stunning. Had Kate Bush been born three decades later and developed a well-honed sense of self-loathing, she very well could have found herself immersed in the same blackened world as Ainsoph. As it is, I.V.’s vocals sit within the sonic intensity of the music as an equal peer, another instrument to communicate the despair and longing implicit in the abrasive, yet melodic, noise the band makes.
Indicative of what’s to come, “Cowardice” showcases what the band does best: I.V.’s carefully layered vocals, rollicking bass riffs that sometimes take off in directions of their own, warm washes of distorted, chorus-drenched guitars and aggressive, yet languid drums. The outro of “Cowardice” is a straight-up killer, just to let you know that while the band takes this shit seriously, they can still get the heads a-banging. There’s no pause between “Cowardice” and second song “The beaten path made flesh”, the first to show the band’s black metal pedigree. “The beaten path made flesh” starts with a no-fucks-given black n’ roll riff before exploding into an absolute blizzard of buzz-saw guitars and slow and trve blast beats, the ringing of the ride cymbal echoing the pain of T.D.’s soaking wet guitars.
While the album isn’t explicitly conceptual in nature, there are common themes throughout. The arrangement of the pieces seems to tell the story of being stranded on that metaphorical island, weathering the turbulence of a civilization gone mad. If the first two songs find our feet firmly entrenched in the rain-soaked mud of the wetlands, “Zeal like a timeless vacuum” finds the storm front closing in on all sides. Lyrically, the band errs on the side of brevity, and yet each line carries a weight that would break the back of any load-bearing animal. I.V.’s lyrics are mired in a fatalistic nihilism, an acknowledgement that nothing can be trusted or believed:
‘And here we lay
On this rotten plane of mold,
Zeal like a timeless vacuum.
But I must go it alone.
The demon’s name is deception.‘
The midpoint of the album brings the two songs together that bridge the gap between the initial joy (or deception) of “Affection” and the soul-destroying quest for “Vengeance”. Both songs are sandwiched around “Call to the fire,” the three representing the rising action in Ainsoph‘s journey into the deepest parts of ourselves and how that is reflected onto the world around us. Ainsoph‘s blackgaze may not have the musicality of a Deafheaven, but they more than make up for it in their ability to convey the aching of the heart. While similar to Whirr‘s commitment to the heaviest of shoegazing, there’s no My Bloody Valentine worshipping at play here. The aforementioned bands are not in the business of telling a story. It seems Ainsoph, on the other hand, feels there is no other way of communicating the acute agony of existence then through the chronological construction of a single life’s journey.
The crystalline guitars and the beautiful vocal harmonies of “Vengeance”, a two-minute excursion into the quest for revenge, pave the way for the album’s strongest track, “Seven mouths in the neck”. The rollicking mid tempo groove conjures up some of Deafheaven‘s best work from Sunbather. T.D.’s guitars build a bridge between modern blackgaze and the best work from Cocteau Twins or Slowdive, tasteful, simple and filled with joy until the dissonance hits at the halfway mark. The guitars subtly switch from major-key ecstasy to a minor plunge into an arpeggiated hell. ‘You left yourself there and convinced yourself you found a home,’ I.V. laments, a bass line working its way up and down the fretboard as if trying to mimic a lifelong quest for acceptance and peace, a tranquility that will never come.
While black metal revels in nihilism and disbelief, there has always been a sense of catharsis wrapped up in the music itself. When my friend pointed at the moon, he was pointing at an escape, an island in the vast chaos of space, a place of deliverance, an emptiness devoid of misery, despair and violence. ‘Art thou pale for weariness,’ the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote of our only natural satellite, ‘Of climbing Heaven, and gazing on the earth.’ Ainsoph has planted their feet firmly in the lunar dust of the moon, looking back on a planet suffocating in desolation and gloom, immersed in weariness. Affection & Vengeance is a powerful testament to our ability to accept soul-crushing amounts of misery, and still find some slither of moonlight piercing through the fog of that pain.
