It’s so scary to think about where metal would be without the existence of centuries-old castles, forlorn and all-consuming loneliness, and general esoterica. Is there anything cooler than imagining yourself as a curly-fingered, ancient vampire with powers beyond imagination wearing a long, silken cloak roaming around the stone floor of an old banquet hall lit by nothing but candles? If you’re the kind of person who would think of that and say ‘hell yeah‘, then maybe Felgrave is for you… but are you for Felgrave?
Mashing and grafting black, death, and even some doom metal together into a single legion, this one-man Norwegian band evokes these feelings and much more on Otherlike Darknesses. It’s a busy album – maybe the description above sounds more ambient and destitute, but Felgrave is anything but. Across three long-ass tracks, the LP battles with itself just as much as it does external forces sometimes even including you as a listener. Musically, there’s always a riff or hard-driving rhythm nailing into you like a stake to the heart, with bile-slathered vocals coating the air with an acrid heat. That is, when they aren’t soaring highly and cleanly, as if beckoning to a night sky with a lone, pale moon hanging against the dark.
It’s a lot to take in honestly. Felgrave never feels like it’s necessarily overplaying or crashing into your head with the amount of music going on, but its sequences of action (which are most of every song) can be dizzying even for someone like me who is way used to explosive, massive metal by now, or so I thought. It does help capture the entropy of Otherlike Darknesses‘ stories though. Told through densely poetic and magical lyrics, each song is an ode to a being or plane(s) of otherworldly power, someone or -thing godlike or metaphysically unknowable. There’s a nice section of the title track, the second major part of the song, where the instrumentation takes on this blackened doom gurgle and toil as the following lyrics practically crawl out of the singer’s angular throat: ‘And with moonrise comes a shifting/With twilight comes an end/The gleaming path ever wanders.’ After a short instrumental break, the song cracks out of its shell into a halcyon fervor for the following to be brightly, and really beautifully, sung: ‘I sing for the ghosts in the sky/I dream lest their trail fall aside/My thoughts ride the passing of time.’ Chills every time.
Not to be outdone though, the instrumentation (again, all done by one guy except drums) has its show-stealing moments. The final segment of “Pale Flowers Under an Empty Sky” sees progressive death metal tendencies flood the soundscape, and the bass sounds like some “Flight of the Bumblebee” shit, trailing up and down scales to be heard loudly and clearly on each track with its own embellishments in certain areas like this one. I also really love the main lead-in and first substantial guitar melody we’re thrown to three minutes in on “Winds Batter My Keep”, which is a sick-ass name by the way. There’s such a stirring power in all of this music, it’s really hard to pin down and talk about in detail.
If absolutely nothing else, this album melds several metal genres in a way I legitimately haven’t heard done in this manner before. Personally, I do appreciate a little more definition and distinction among my genre-melding bands, and that’s what makes Otherlike Darknesses challenging for me. It’s like seeing out of three different heads at once where each one has its own bearing and spatial context, but trying to focus on all three viewpoints at once overwhelms. It’s verbose, but legible with intense focus; like listening to two or three different songs play at once without the unintelligible messiness that implies. Please know that Felgrave is without a doubt an immensely talented and thought-out project, hardly a disjointed slopfest that some extreme metal can devolve to for better or worse, but it also absolutely knocks my world upside-down even after several listens.
Felgrave has made one of the more enigmatic metal albums I’ve heard in recent memory. Just when I think I can’t be surprised much anymore in my mid-thirties and over two decades of perusing metal and heavy music in general, here’s an album that almost stumped me. I want to be clear: this is a good album – it’s wrought with dark beauty and an arcane excess that feels like sticking the same hand through three different portals at once and being showered by each one’s unique temperament. It’s not often I can say I’ve had a new experience listening to music, but damn it if Otherlike Darknesses didn’t give me one. My brain is a roiled, mercurial soup and, somehow, I’m happy with that.
