This makes the third time in almost four years that we’ve had the privilege of premiering music by the distinctive Norwegian band Svart Lotus. It’s been a privilege because every time has given us the occasion to be surprised, and each surprise has created further intrigue about what will come next.
Now what comes next is the band’s second album, Som et Vondt År. It will be released on March 1st by Hellstain Productions, but you’ll have the chance to hear all of it today.
For those of you who might be encountering Svart Lotus for the first time, it began as a the side project of Tor R. Stavenes, also known as Seidemann from the formidable black metal band 1349. On this new album he wrote the music and almost all the lyrics, and performed guitars, vocals, acoustics, and synthetics. He was joined in the endeavor by drummer Eivin Brye (Djevelkult), guitarist Sigve Jordheim, and bassist Øyvind Kaslegard, who also performed clean vocals on two of the songs.
The album also includes notable guest performances, including Nag (Tsjuder) delivering sections of screaming vocals on two songs, Eldur (Fortíð) contributing with his own unique clean vocals on “Hat og Forakt”, and Jarrett “Nekronatalenheten” Pritchard on lead guitar in “Cryptic Lights”.
Of course, black metal is an important feature of the music, but as before it’s only one element in the band’s transformative musical alchemy, which creates different experiences from song to song. Precisely because of the differences, it’s tempting to touch on each one of the eight tracks; any high-level summary will forfeit much of what makes Som et Vondt År so thoroughly engrossing — and so utterly chilling.
To begin at the beginning, “Fyrelogi” provides a brief but frightening symphonic introduction, which seems to connect to the album’s cover image (more about that later), and then “Distraction Industry” jars the senses with roiling and blaring guitar abrasion, scorching screams, skull-snapping beats, and thrusting bass tones. The music sounds like madness blooming in violence and reveling in the terrible grandeur of its derangement as the lead guitar wails and squirms — but the song’s a big head-mover too.
That song manages to be both feral and supernatural, both catchy and creepy — and the title song, which roughly translates to “like a bad year”, is even creepier. Dismal and diseased in its moods, the riffing lurches, slowly writhes, and flares in sizzling fevers. This time, horrid growls and fervent cries join the crackling snarls and grit-caked chords, and the drumming bursts open in battering flurries as this song too begins to sound like madness in bloom.
“Indifference and Wrath” perpetuates that corrosive feeling of doom, as if channeling the movements of a primitive hulking beast roaring in fury, with a goblin on its back — a cackling fiend that ultimately succeeds in urging the beast into a frenzy made from furious fretwork and high-speed percussive hammering.
There’s really no song on this particular album that sounds born of this world, but the supernatural manifests in different ways. And so the acoustic guitar in “Hat og Forakt” rings while the grimy riffing rasps, and “Eldur” Gudmundsson‘s singing soars with spine-tingling effects. Misery (and gothic horror) seem to radiate from the music, but the beasts come out again too, roaring and screaming as the music throbs and seizes, and the track will give your spine a good jolting too. By the end, while distorted words are spoken, the song gets the listener into a full-body lurch.
It seems no accident that Svart Lotus chose to immediately follow the nightmarish but almost-narcotic finale of “Hat og Forakt” with the violent delirium of “Cryptic Lights“, all blasting drums, churning guitar-foulness, magma-like bass, and spitfire soloing — though the song diverges into weird and warbling tonalities, asylum-quality singing, and a brief but completely unexpected finale that’s weird in a different way.
Fear does lurk in “Lurking Fear“, but that song is also another hulking and heaving musical beast, primitive and diseased, woozy and necrotic. Like other songs here, it will get heads moving. Like most other songs here, the tempo also changes, and the guitar work eventually begins to eerily wail and squirm as the beast frolics. Of course, the vocals remain insane.
Interestingly, Svart Lotus chose to end this one with a song that shares their own name. They also chose to turn up the heat again, discharging flurries of nasty tremolo’d riffing, piston-pumping drums, and rumbling upheavals in the low end.
In its mood, the music of this last song seems to find an intersection between dementia and melancholy. It builds toward a cacophonous crescendo before the cracked and crestfallen reverberations of the guitar take over (but not completely, because the bass makes a big statement too). As the guitar cycles through its disturbing and distorted refrain, over and over, horrid ghosts seem to wail in the depths below, and spoken words give us the final fright.
Well, following all those detailed reactions and reflections, let’s try to come at this from a higher level now: In many ways, and in different dimensions, Som et Vondt År provides an experience in supernatural horror, by turns psychotic, hallucinatory, steeped in dread, and choked in gloom. Unpretentious and often ugly, but also ingenious, it spawns twisted visions of beasts and demons freed from the dark corners where they lurk around us.
It also turns out to be as compulsively listenable as it is macabre. See for yourselves:
The album’s lyrics “deal with contemporary issues of human nature, ego, existentialism, darkness, doom, hopelessness, and despair – suitably covered by cuts from the classic Dr Mabuse’s psychoanalysis”.
And that brings us to the cover image. It’s an excerpt from “Dr Mabuse, der spieler“, a German silent film directed by Fritz Lang that was released in 1922 (you can find out more about it here).
For this album, drums, bass, and vocals were recorded at Brye studios, and guitars were recorded at Seljetun studios. The album was engineered by Eivin Brye, and it was mixed and mastered by Jarrett Pritchard at New Constellation.
The album is recommended for fans of Celtic Frost, Enslaved, and Dødheimsgard.
PRE-ORDER:
https://svartlotus.bandcamp.com/album/som-et-vondt-r
https://hellstain.eu/products/svart-lotus-som-et-vondt-ar-cd?variant=46612529905832
SVART LOTUS:
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100029115116147
https://www.instagram.com/svartlotus_official/
https://svartlotusband.wixsite.com/svartlotus