AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CAILLEACH BHEUR — “CAILLEACH BHEUR”

On June 28th Fiadh Productions will release the self-titled debut album of an unorthodox black metal band named Cailleach Bheur. They prefer to remain anonymous, but as their Scottish Gaelic name suggests (more about the name later), we’re told that all the members were based in Scotland 15 years ago, and one or more still are.

The themes of the album were also inspired by Scottish mythology and folklore, and the music has been in development for quite a long time – more than 10 years. Before we get to the music itself, in all its many eye-popping permutations, we’ll share with you a little more background about the album that we’ve been provided:

An odyssey of myriad themes centered around the dichotomy of self and place, the lyrics explore tradition, people, and culture. Inspired by Scottish folklore and oral tradition, epic poetry, literature, and literary theory – a contemporary eye is cast upon a grand search of heart and soul beset by melancholy and loss. Fantasy and reality clash with questions around received histories, false stereotypes, lost tradition, identity and imaginings, faith and place – all set against a backdrop of landscape, the elements, and nature.

The album is voiced by a chorus of many lives and many pasts, revealing and observing the land and its people. Each piece is guided by a bird in flight bringing their unique call to the journey within: past, present, future. Led by the raven from the void of no stars and no sun, to the crows overseeing the crossing of the earth, to the Queen of Winter, architect of stone and cold beset by the withering of fading belief. The thieving magpie is harbinger of many takings amid the absence of permanence and the eagle’s prey, while the warning of the lost seers is seen to be: a final breath in a storm.

Concerning the band’s Scottish Gaelic name, Cailleach means an old woman or hag, but the Cailleach Bheur refers to a figure from Scottish highland folklore, the Queen of Winter. A great deal more information about her legend is available at The Font of All Human Knowledge.

And now we move to the album’s music, which consists of five longer-than-average songs, each of them in a roughly 8-13 minute range. Fiadh Productions has described it as “frigid Scottish-influenced black metal with strong heavy metal influences and Emperor/Dimmu vibes.” That’s a useful description, but we’ll try to expand on it.

Whether you call it mood, emotion, or atmosphere, the expression of feeling and of time and place seems to be at the core of what Cailleach Bheur have done here, expressions described in the background information we quoted above. Just as the subject matter’s scope ranges far and wide, traveling in time and through culture as well as daunting landscapes and hard seasons, so too do the ingredients in the music.

That becomes quickly evident in the harrowing first song, “No Stars, No Sun“. A bracing and hard-slugging gallop at first, it soon becomes mysterious and orders of magnitude more frightening and expansive, as the riffing relentlessly coils the tension and distressing synths shimmer.

The ragged and furious screams of the vocals are themselves seriously frightening from their first appearance, and the instrumental convulsions and blasting drums amplify the fear. Yet as the drumming shifts and slows and the melody becomes even more vast, it also sounds more melancholy, a haunting made of memory.

The voice drops into a grim and gravelly baritone recital, and the song elevates into a kind of sorrowful splendor, which gradually becomes more stricken and doomed in its atmosphere, more soul-crushing and hopeless.

And all that happens in only the first half of this long song. More changes are yet to come – phases of droning and drifting that are even more frightening and filled with peril than the assaults that have come before; singing that wails sky-high as the galloping begins again; earthquake upheavals in the low end; combinations of strongly jolting chords and frantically darting guitar arpeggios that blare like outbursts of sinister dementia; and at the end, an orchestration of mysticism and mystery as the setting for deep and scary spoken words.

From just that one song it becomes apparent that Cailleach Bheur‘s songcraft is richly multi-faceted and prone to surprises, both instrumentally and vocally. Those many facets include nimble and nuanced bass-lines and ever-changing drum patterns, as well as the afore-mentioned ingredients of freezing black metal, visceral heavy metal, and synth embellishments, sometimes providing an unearthly sheen and sometimes drawing upon classical orchestration.

As the song evolves, it manages to be become both feral and surreal, both fiendishly diabolical and humanly grief-stricken, pulse-punching and head-spinning. What you might have been expecting but won’t find, however, is any kind of prominent role for old Scottish folk melody or acoustic instrumentation, which tends to be a hallmark of more prominent Scottish black metal bands.

It’s evident that while Cailleach Bheur draw their inspiration from Scottish history and folkloric culture, their musical proclivities lean into the avant-garde (for want of a better term), and that’s borne out by the album’s subsequent four songs, which are just as elaborate and surprising as the first one, and just as theatrical and modern (again, for want of a better term).

Indeed, while the label’s references to the likes of Emperor and Dimmu aren’t out of place, this is far away from a re-tread of ’90s black metal, even in the vein of those bands. One might also want to mention the likes of Ved Buens Ende, Arcturus, and Dødheimsgard, though I don’t mean to suggest that Cailleach Bheur are clones of those bands either. You might even come to think of it as an epic rock opera.

To re-emphasize the point, in the songs to come you’ll encounter soulful, abyssal, and wailing singing as well as strangled growls and goblin snarls that are ugly as sin, together with sweeping orchestration, cosmic synth ambience, blast-beat fusillades, boiling and slashing tremolo’d riffs, proggy bass maneuvers with a warmly humming tone, and lots of weirdly twisting and sublimely fluid lead-guitar performances (and a few bits of weird electronica too).

You’ll also be greeted by episodes that do indeed conjure musical images of fantasy and gothic horror, “A Requiem for Men and Saints” being a prime example (it’s also the prime example of the heart-breaking power of the singing on the album). There might even be some acoustic strumming and flutes (or at least flute-like tones) in the mix, but again, you won’t think of this as a “folk metal” album.

Having heard the album, straight through to the torment, wretchedness, and heart-ache so powerfully manifested in the closing song, with all its impassioned theatrical singing and recitals, it comes as no surprise that it was 10 years in the making. The songs are so intricately plotted, so elaborately layered, and so conscientiously performed that you’d never think it was thrown together hurriedly. And fortunately, it’s produced in a way that allows all the ingredients, all the constantly changing moving parts, to shine.

There’s more than a fair chance this album will fly under the radars of most people, which would be a crying shame, because it really is an extraordinary achievement. Of course, we’re doing our best to get it up dead-center on radar screens today. Hopefully, you’ll now understand why as you delve into the complete premiere stream:

 

 

PRE-ORDER:
https://cailleachbheurbm.bandcamp.com/album/cailleach-bheur