AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): RITUALMORD — “THIS IS NOT LIFELOVER”

(written by Islander)

Few long-gone bands from the underground still have as passionately devoted a following as the Swedish group Lifelover. Two of that band’s surviving members have worked together under the name Ritualmord to create a debut album that will be released tomorrow by Unjoy – Art & Ritualia. That pedigree alone would attract Lifelover fans to the album like iron filings to a magnet, but almost like a rebuff of an old lover, Ritualmord named their album This Is Not Lifelover.

And the album’s name is mostly true, but not entirely true. It isn’t Lifelover, but to use a cliché, there are some Lifelover nucleotides in Ritualmord‘s DNA — though indeed it’s true that the other ingredients of their musical polymer are quite different from what a Lifelover fan would expect and possibly hope for — though it may reflect where Lifelover would have gone (to more vast and mind-bending places), had it lived.

In lieu of typical PR promotional texts, the two people behind the album, ( ) (Kim Carlsson) and 1853 (Johan Gabrielson) have crafted a different kind of introduction, and we ought to begin there in presenting today’s album premiere:

A shapeshifting beast to sacrifice.
Conduit of meditations to emanations.
Through the vessels ( ) & 1853,
Ritualmord manifests.

Unbound by genres and style.
Firmly rooted in black metal.
Not as a mere genre, but lifestyle.

With each release, a pursuit to explore.
From neofolk-tinged acoustic rumbles to alternative electronic flirting with industrial.
Drones emerging into post-rock.
Some may say post-black metal, someday.

It began as a place where songs from Lifelover and Hypothermia would go.
As we grow as artists and individuals, yet remain true to ourselves and ideals.
Which is one of the foundations that made those aforementioned bands stand out from the masses.

To creatively be and remain original.
True to ourselves and the art that we live for.
Without boundaries. Ever-evolving.

Behind us are three EPS, ahead of us is the following: our first full-length, This is Not Lifelover.

True to those words, Ritualmord‘s first album is a shapeshifter, albeit one whose shifting shapes are still connected.

The shapeshifting begins quickly. The album overture “Inandan” envelops the listener in a collage of strange and shrill sounds, eerie and a bit threatening, but the following song “Stonerpop” (a previously released single) brings a throbbing and bouncing pulse and lush ringing vibrations, like a tapestry of stars.

The spoken words are grim in tone, dour and earthy and bitter, in contrast to the music’s glittering brilliance, though they become an order of magnitude more intense and distressing before the end. The swaths of sound around them become more distressing too, though the evolution is seamless. That song, wholly immersive in its embrace, invokes remembrances of Lifelover and of dark post-punk, or maybe what some people these days would call synthwave.

The presence of shimmering radiations and spoken words is one constant across the album, though those spectral swaths channel varying arrays of emotion, and at times the words are gasped or screamed, strident in their passion, or sound like a telephone conversation on old instruments or even older phonograph recordings.

(The unusual vocals are the most consistently depressive and disturbing feature across the album, but they are undeniably authentic in their expressions of wretchedness and rage.)

The slow-rocking steadiness of the drums is another near-constant, along with the musing and brooding voice of the bass. Morose and meditative guitars also make their presence known, gently picked and strummed. And the guitars also swarm and crash in feverish waves, intermingled with synths so that you can’t really pick them apart. At those times, as in “Spår“, the music’s intensity is overpowering in its sweep and the scale of its torment.

In other respects, the album becomes very dark and menacing, very tortured and hopeless, and frighteningly surreal, and “Tjära” is a harrowing example of that. The contrast between that song and “Stonerpop” shows just how dramatically this shapeshifter can morph.

Other contrasts emerge, as when the near-pastoral and yearning strains of “Tid” and its ethereal, softly dancing keys become subsumed in brilliance and dominated by vocals that go mad, or when “Andetag” becomes a racing gallop, trying to outpace a vast solar flare, or as in “Inifrån och ut“, which evokes a stately, majestic procession, haunting and ultimately frightening in its glory — but even then not as frightening as the calamitous glories in the heavily throbbing but also cosmically hallucinatory “Slutna ögon“.

The contrasts include mysterious and introspective musical ebbs — slow, simple and lonesome — that transform into vast and astonishing (and even hard-rocking) flows, with vocal troughs and crests of intensity as well (e.g., “Se mig” and “Vår väntan…“), and moments of cosmic drift that reveal the freezing void (“All tid rasar samman“)

The emotional quotients of the music are recognizably human, a changing tapestry of wistfulness and remembrance, of regret and ruin, of wrenching grief and shattering affliction. The beats are recognizably human too, mostly simple but compulsive things. But the melodies are conveyed in ways that often don’t seem earthly at all, phases of celestial wonder that dwarf the damaged people huddled or wandering below (one last offering of which comes in the heart-stopping “Totalitär tomhet“, a final reminder that this isn’t Lifelover).

For more info, and to pick up the album when it becomes available, check the links below.

https://ritualmord.bandcamp.com
https://www.instagram.com/ritualmord.official
https://www.facebook.com/ritualmord.official
https://www.unjoy.com/