#skythala

See the title of the record’s excellent opening track, “Eternal Nuclear Dawn,” which seems to posit an imaginary landscape in which the blinding conflagration of an H-bomb’s detonation greets the coming of each new day. Happy thoughts, those ain’t. Additional verbal play in some of the LP’s song titles elaborates on the agonistic sensibility: “Boreal Phrenological Despair,” “Yielding Quivers of Revolution.” The artists in SkyThala have not released lyrics to the songs (an unusual move for a record released on I, Voidhanger), so it’s hard to know what themes dominate, beyond those suggestive phrases. The music is certainly full of gnarled, involuted and then explosively expansive gesturing — warping bundles of tension that suddenly unfold toward catharsis. Whether that’s freighted with apocalyptic affect is an open question. 

The innovative dissonance in SkyThala’s music is clearly informed by Stravinsky’s neoclassical grandness, especially the long, woodwind-driven middle sections of “Variegated Stances of Self Mockery” and the aforementioned “Yielding Quivers…” It’s strange and exciting terrain for a black metal band to explore. Stravinsky’s equally strange politics raise more loaded questions. The Russian composer’s famous antipathy to Bolshevism is fairly easy to understand; his enthusiasm for Mussolini’s fascism is a thinkable (if repugnant) reactionary complement to that aversion to revolutionary politics. But it’s queasy stuff, at minimum, when a black metal band signals interest in another artist who has fucked with fascists. 

The band and the label have both been tight-lipped about the folks who made this music; I, Voidhanger has made some cryptic references to Moonlight Cypress Archetypes, and that label’s Bandcamp lists one “R” among SkyThala’s personnel. That strongly suggests that Ryan Clackner is in the band; the guitar playing is certainly dexterous and searching enough. But this band’s governing aesthetic is far removed from the Southern Appalachian and Delta blues orientations of Clackner’s Vile Haint or Crestfallen Dusk. The impulse to combine black metal’s tones and rhythms with a far-flung set of musical concepts and sounds, on the other hand, is well within Clackner’s bailiwick. SkyThala’s work is ambitious and enormously affecting, twisting black metal into new shapes.