Murderer, arsonist, racist-- Varg Vikernes is all these and more. Yet his most enduring legacy isn't the corpse of Euronymous, his band mate in Mayhem, whom he stabbed to death; nor the ashes of the Norwegian churches he was convicted of torching; nor his rambling writings on race and nationalism that have led weaker minds to tie Nazism to black metal. Vikernes will live on longest with Burzum, his one-man band that redefined black metal's parameters.
Burzum made black metal an open system. No longer was the music just a blastbeat-driven blur. Burzum slowed it down, bent it into strange angles, and pushed and pulled them into long, exploratory tracks. Denied a guitar while incarcerated, Vikernes turned Burzum towards keyboard-based ambience with wispy, faux-classical melodies. The astral synths of "Rundtgåing Av Den Transcendentale Egenbetens Støtte", from 1996's Filosofem, could have been on Warp. Freed from strictures like bandmates and song structures, lone wolves the world over have explored Burzum's template. To name but a few-- Leviathan, Krohm (USA), Nortt (Denmark), Hypothermia (Sweden), Elysian Blaze (Australia), and Taarma (Afghanistan). (Ironically, the most prominent of Burzum's progeny, Xasthur, has developed such a defined sound that it's become a closed system.)
Buffalo, New York's Wrath of the Weak is a worthy, if unlikely, addition to Burzum's brood. The few pictures that exist of "Jordan," the band's mastermind, are startling-- a kid with glasses and a baseball cap, jeans, and sneakers. He should be strumming in coffeehouses, not unleashing feedback-soaked dirges that update Creation Records with corpse paint.
Much has been made of black metal's connection to shoegaze. Both prize texture over definition, and transcendence through fuzz. While Enslaved occasionally evoke a ballsier Swervedriver, Wrath of the Weak pins that band's abstract emotion in the red. Alogon chains together digital distortion into scathing sheets of sound, recalling early Jesus and Mary Chain. The core sound is thin, but multiplied in layers of noise and harmonics, it becomes torrential. Yet the muck is surprisingly easy to penetrate. The chords are hardly metallic in the conventional sense. No macho machine-gun riffs here, just smears of melancholy.
This record armors a very vulnerable center. The vocals hide behind distortion and reduce to strangled cries in the distance. Like with My Bloody Valentine, they're simply another texture. However, they're so sparse that the record is essentially instrumental. In their fearsome fragility, the guitars go far, becoming hypnotic through repetition. After too long, though, they become repetitious. More, and stronger, vocals might help. Unlike Xasthur, who's mired in a self-created miasma, Wrath of the Weak might have something to say.
But even Burzum was a perpetual work-in-progress, and not all brilliant. That happens when one breaks old rules to make new ones. Alogon's greatest misstep is its most blatant Burzum worship: a 21-minute ambient snoozefest. Otherwise, it's a diamond in the rough. Its obscuring is sublime; its unveiling might be more so.
