Microcosmos

Chronique

One of black metal's most prolific groups, the Ukraine's Drudkh have been known to issue as many as two full-lengths a year, so the two-year wait leading up to their seventh album (and first for the Season of Mist label), 2009's Microcosmos, must have been especially painful to their small but devoted fan base. Then again, these fans may be less anxious and curious than most, given Drudkh's career-long policy of publicizing no photos, no interviews, no concerts, not even an official website -- a remarkably atypical stance in the media-heavy 21st century that has, needless to say, only added to their mystique. Mystique, after all, is one of the chief attractions of the band's particularly obscure black metal recipe, since there's only so much one can glean about its relation to their Ukrainian musical heritage without the public availability mentioned above, or so much as a lyric sheet to support it. The best one can do -- from a Western perspective anyway -- is look out for unknown sounds and compare and contrast the group's epic and (this much is known) Ukrainian folk-infused compositions against those of like-minded bands like Romania's Negura Bunget, Finland's Moonsorrow, or Norway's Windir. And this is where Drudkh's greatness ultimately emerges from the fog to manifest itself: via the unquestionably foreign (for lack of better word) aesthetic with which the band weaves majestic, slowly evolving melodic themes of unknown origin ("folk" being too simplistic a term) amidst the sparingly used, tired and token black metal elements one does expect, like blastbeat runs, buzzsaw riffing, and tormented vocal rasps. As a result, these rare reversions to black metal "normalcy" wind up giving Microcosmos just the sort of sporadic, emotionally cathartic punctuations it needs to humanize its otherwise sweeping, cinematic flow, and keep it from descending into the calculated numbness of soundtrack reverie. Indeed, for a genre (black metal) characterized by grim-faced bands set on showing as little emotion as possible (lest it be violently negative emotion), Drudkh's astonishingly candid, almost romantic, approach to their craft allows their music to emote and, one might venture, say all that is left unspoken by their aversion to publicity. And going by the rich musical evidence provided on Microcosmos, perhaps there really is nothing else for Drudkh to say in interviews, photographs, websites, etc.

© Eduardo Rivadavia /TiVo