For all the fervor that's supposed to define its spirit, black metal essentially amounts to a set of affectations bundled together into a genre. This is especially apparent when artists outside of Scandinavia adopt hallmark signifiers like facepaint, illegible band logos that look like cobwebs, Satanism, ratty production values, and a harsh, staticky brand of guitar distortion that sounds like static. Not unlike the way rappers across the globe aspire to a constellation of mannerisms that first coalesced in the Bronx, today's black metal artists, regardless of where they're from, mold themselves after an attitude that blossomed within a distinctly Nordic headspace during the genre's early-'90s Second Wave.
Still, it comes as something of a surprise that Austin Lunn of the U.S.-based solo act Panopticon harbors such an open fascination with vague, mythical notions of "the North." His last album was titled Roads to the North, this new album Autumn Eternal includes a track titled "Into the North Woods", and several Panopticon releases feature wintry, foreboding landscapes as cover art that will immediately strike a chord with aficionados. But the "North" that Lunn invokes is actually his adoptive home of Minnesota. And, though the multi-instrumentalist has made a personal principle out of staying reclusive, his isolation shouldn't be mistaken for the misanthropic fury that has driven black metal's most notorious antiheroes.
As Autumn Eternal, Panopticon's seventh full-length, again makes clear, Lunn is an artist capable of appropriating core aesthetics from a number of genres while simultaneously honoring them—a balance that requires no small measure of dexterity. Lunn's manifesto-like notes on Bandcamp betray a sensitive heart that he wears on his sleeve. Clearly, Panopticon's music isn't motivated by hate or nihilism, and one can easily imagine a Henry David Thoreau-like figure retreating to the woods to contemplate personal, spiritual, and environmental concerns while Bon Iver's Justin Vernon nurses his love wounds in the cabin next door. More importantly, Lunn's work lacks the creepy jingoism that some of his Nordic peers have embraced on the slippery slope to Nazi/white supremacist sympathies. The bands that have flirted with ugly racial undertones have, of course, enjoyed the twin benefits of titillating fans and repulsing detractors, cultivating an aura of danger while hiding safely behind suggestion.
Lunn has no need for such coyness because his heart is in an entirely different place. To be fair, it's not like you can understand what he's singing about. And whether or not his intentions truly give this music a more humanistic vibe than other black metal fare is debatable. But his musical agility certainly does set Panopticon apart, Autumn Eternal in particular. As he has in the past, Lunn infuses atmospheric black metal and European melodic/symphonic death metal with prog rock, post rock and, perhaps most audaciously, bluegrass. On paper, those combinations reek of calculation, but Lunn has long proven his ability to blend them into a seamless, irony-free sound, a sound he continues to forge ahead with on Autumn Eternal. Black metal bands have been paying homage to Viking folk tradition for years now, but the results have often been laughable. When Lunn incorporates acoustic roots expressions from the hills of Kentucky, it comes off neither as an academic exercise nor as an attempt to parody his overseas counterparts.
In fact, there's no denying the earnestness of Autumn Eternal opener "Tamarack's Gold Returns", which prominently features violin work by Johan Becker of Chicago's Austaras alongside Lunn's own dobro playing. Where artists following the metal playbook would have fashioned the tune as a one-minute intro, Lunn and Becker go on for a full three minutes-plus before the music gives way to a minutes' worth of a found-sound ambient recording of Lunn spending time in nature. After that, a hail of ornate, baroque-style metal kicks in with lead guitars wailing dramatically over double bass drum rolls before Lunn makes his vocal entrance. Piercing but also bottom-heavy, Lunn's voice emanates brute animal power. He also allows for long instrumental sections where he refrains from singing, which only highlights its impact when he starts to howl.
Autumn Eternal concludes the trilogy that Lunn started with 2012's Kentucky and continued with Roads to the North. Listeners who have followed Panopticon since that point or before will no doubt quibble over whether he's gone too far—or maybe not far enough—with the stylistic variety this time. Other than the myriad twists and turns on the epic "Sleep to the Sound of the Waves Crashing", Lunn generally approaches the new material as if he's streamlining his approach rather than going for more audacious or pointed ways to combine his influences. During one of the blast-beat sections on "Waves Crashing", the mix suddenly strips down to the point where it feels like you're listening to the drums from inside the unflattering acoustics of a rehearsal space while the guitarist tests a new reverb pedal from the adjacent room. Becker's violin on the song switches gears from a rustic Scottish/Irish vibe to film score melodrama. "Pale Ghosts", meanwhile, finds a space for Mono-esque shoegaze within the DNA of furious black metal riffing before the song takes flight into a dreamy passage anchored by a melancholic guitar arpeggio.
Lunn has a way of making these and other elements sound perfectly at home with one another. In truth, nothing on Autumn Eternal jumps out as incongruous, which suggests that Lunn is simply expanding—not trying to radically alter—the black metal formula. Still, by renouncing its obligatory celebration of malice, Panopticon gives the form a much-needed makeover, and with Autumn Eternal, Austin Lunn further uncovers musical potential that's long been overshadowed by too much bad-boy posturing.
