#caligari

Some of the harshness may derive from the location of the music’s creation. Oulu is way north, situated above other storied cities in black metal’s history, like Gothenburg, Trondheim or Turku. The dark and cold are long there. So is the sadness that inflects the riffs and pace of “Stella Signata,” perhaps the best of the three songs on Telestic Ekstasis. It’s the doomiest tune on the EP, slow and melodic. The textures, however, are typical of Citrinitas, grainy, gritty, somehow alienated from the listener. The tones suggest travel in a slightly different cosmos, and the music is charged with its traces: it’s far out, and it feels frightening.

But that misconstrues Citrinitas’ principal strength, which is the band’s ability to produce such sustained atmosphere. And that is, in turn, another way of saying that their music has powerful presence. It is here. Singular and strange, but very much of this world. Telestic Ekstasis sharpens the band’s sound by cleaning up the production, not enough to suggest clean surfaces or profesh tidiness, but sufficient to capturing the big riffs of the title track, and of the turn to whirring, whining, dissonant noise that closes the EP. The collapse into distorted amp abuse is a reminder of Citrinitas’s disinterest in reason and order. Those first principles are in increasing conflict with the band’s musicality. It’s a compelling conflict to tune into.

Check out “Warped Abyssal Architectures” (see what I mean about built space?), and you’ll get tuned in to the requisite sonic signals. Not quite as demented as Antediluvian, but deranged all the same; not quite as horizontally disorienting in its compositions as Acausal Intrusion’s songs, but dizzying and perverse at numerous points; attempting the same fusion of experimental freak-out with atavistic muscularity as Haunter achieved on its excellent Sacramental Death Qualia (2019)—Ignobleth seems equally attracted to spacey, esoteric weirdness and to death metal’s fleshy, feculent voluptuousness.

Perhaps the most effective songs on Manor of Primitive Anticreation are the two-track “Proselyte Pig” sequence. “Proselyte Pig I” is all thump and thunder, a growling, grueling piledriver of death metal in the “whirling chaos” mode. The vocals are cavernous, and the riffs are all visceral froth. “Proselyte Pig II” amps up the dread, stomping through its first two minutes with doomy deliberation. The rest of the song slips in and out of blasting passages and closes with a minute of purring, whirring electronics. The array of ideas seems contrived, and more than a little chaotic, but the band moves with conviction among them. They just about convince you.

When it comes down to a choice between aggro heaviness and maniacal complexity, Ignobleth errs toward the former, but the band’s investigations of distorted and disjoint forms augurs rich development. Or at least some ripe musical decomposition.

That noted, Barbaric Oath churns out some hugely satisfying Metal ov Death. Old school in its simplicity, evoking Incantation’s mid-90s nastiness and early Bolt Thrower’s brawn, blackened in its grittier textures — for listeners who wince with contempt at the notion of proggy or “cosmic” death metal, there’s a lot to enjoy in Barbaric Oath’s recalcitrant refusal to take itself seriously. And there was no guarantee of that: at least two of the musicians involved in Barbaric Oath — identified here only as “G” and “L” — also collaborate in portentous death-doom outfit Nekus, a band with absolutely no sense of humor.

So goes the multi-dimensionality of man. And it’s also the case that Barbaric Oath seems perversely sincere in its celebration of nerd culture that doesn’t often get shout-outs in death metal’s hypermasculine environment. The band names RPG HeroQuest as a principal inspiration (and, one imagines, thematic source). And there’s also a kind of B-movie scholarship at work, lifting lines of narration and dialogue from Albert Pyun’s The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982); the film is both gleeful and entirely insipid.

It seems that Barbaric Oath has stumbled (or charged, with forthright energy) into a very sweet spot for underground metal. The music is undeniably direct and aggro. The surface-level symbolics are disarmingly stoopid, performing the resistance to anything that passes for intellectual so intrinsic to metal’s populism. But just under those thundering, muscular surfaces, there’s a clever engagement with other pop media that suggests a critical consciousness at work. Maybe that’s all too clever by half. And likely Barbaric Oath would be happiest if we just tuned in to “Crom Cult” and turned it way up.