(written by Islander)
The unifying theme that explains the grouping of today’s three selections for this list is… black metal… but although they all fit under that large and ever-expanding genre tent, each is quite different from the others.
To explore the songs laid out in the preceding 15 Parts of the list, go here.
PAYSAGE D’HIVER
In Part 6 of this list I included a song by Calcarata that I was confident was the longest song I’ve ever picked for one of these lists in the 16 years I’ve been doing them. That song was 17 minutes long. But today I’m starting with one that’s even longer, the 18+ minute opening track from Paysage D’Hiver‘s monumental 2024 album Die Berge.
I know that I’m pushing, if not breaking, the limits of what this list is about, where “infectiousness” most often means “catchiness.” As I’ve explained repeatedly over the years, the list isn’t devoted to the best songs of the year in some “critical” sense (in quotes, because I don’t consider myself a music critic, just an ardent fan), but I’ve also explained that “infectious” as I define it includes memorability, and can signify “most played.”
Even at more than 18 minutes, I’ve played “Urgrund” a lot. And if I’m bending or breaking the rules at all, it may also be because I find it such a great artistic achievement, and so in keeping with the album’s concept, and I couldn’t bring myself to leave it out. I’ll crib from what I wrote after first hearing it:
Tempted as I am to linguistically map each step of this long journey, I’ll refrain. But I will say that the song does very much sound like a harrowing journey higher and higher up into jagged, hostile, ice-bound crags.
The lonely traveler, his heart thundering, encounters roiling torrents of frozen crystal that cut like knives, roaring and screaming his way forward in the midst of breathtaking gales that sound as vast as the looming peaks, and dodging the rumble of avalanche boulders coming down.
Caught in such a violent and unforgiving place, it would be easy to give up, but the traveler somehow forges onward, stomping upward in determination (along with the song’s jolting grooves and the pulsating wail of the lead guitar). The sweep and raw power and intensity of the music is essentially unrelenting, unceasing in its extremely harrowing and epic-scale sensations.
Even at the end, when the emotional quality of the music reaches a zenith of broken-ness and despair, and the drums drop like megaton bombs, it yields no relief….
https://paysagedhiver.bandcamp.com/album/die-berge
http://www.facebook.com/paysagedhiver.official
MERRIMACK
I’m still perplexed that none of us here managed to prepare a stand-alone review of Merrimack‘s latest album, Of Grace and Gravity. The best we could do was my abbreviated encouragement in a Shades of Black column, followed much later by DGR‘s mini-review as part of his YE list (where he put Of Grace and Gravity at No. 23).
I re-read both of those write-ups, and even though they weren’t stand-alone reviews, I think we did a good job expressing what makes the album such a merciless, ruinous, staggering, and yet fascinating experience. Rather than wrestle with myself over which of three songs I was considering as Merrimack candidates for this list, I deferred to DGR‘s recommendation of “Sublunar Despondency.”
On the one hand, the song quickly injects a big bolus of adrenaline into the listener, ruthlessly hammering and blazing like wildfire in the skies — soaring, sweeping, searing, and frantically writhing in its glorious yet distressing intensity. That alone is so gripping that it could justify the song’s inclusion here, without more. But when the drums steady, the music also seems to peal and ring like the wail of stellar bells, a manifestation of affliction that’s at least equally head-catching, and matched by the affliction of the vocals.
And before the song ends it suddenly softens, becoming more eerie but no less afflicted, a brief diversion before the song rises up in terrible grandeur once more.
https://merrimack.bandcamp.com/album/of-grace-and-gravity
https://www.facebook.com/merrimackofficial
AKVAN
Somewhere in a previous installment of this list I mentioned a quandary I run into almost every year but can’t remember whether I’ve resolved consistently: Do I, or do I not, consider a song first released in the year that’s the focus of the list though it appears on an album released in the following year? Akvan‘s “Aryan Fire” raises a different but sort of related quandary: Do I, or do I not, consider a song released as a single during the year before the subject year, which was later included in an EP or album released during the subject year?
Akvan (اكوان) first released “Aryan Fire” (آتش آریایی) as a stand-alone single in 2023, but then included it in the 2024 EP Savushan (سووشون). I wrote about the song when it came out in 2023, and then briefly wrote about the whole EP after it was released last May.
In hindsight, I probably would have included “Aryan Fire” in a 2023 Most Infectious Song list – but a ruinous stretch of my day job prevented me from making one. That would have avoided today’s conundrum. But you see how I resolved it. I’ll borrow from my reactions the first time I heard the song; they haven’t changed:
Lyrically, the song is furious, a warrior’s resolution to take their land back from barbarians and “their blue-eyed God”, from “Sparta’s curs and/Three hundred lies”. Musically, the song is as fiery as its name portends, but distressing (to the point of delirium) as well as warlike, and epic in its sweep.
As in the past Akvan interweaves melodies that seem rooted in the traditions of his Persian homeland, and segues into a cruel and swaggering progression that eventually boils over into breathtaking incendiary intensity.
(For those new to Akvan, Vizaresa uses the word “Aryan” in the band’s lyrics to mean “people from Iran”, the historically accurate definition, and not in the way Nazis stole and mutated the term.)
https://akvan.bandcamp.com/album/–7
https://www.facebook.com/akvanblackmetal/