AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): VÍGLJÓS — “TOME I: APIDÆ”

“Not all black metal must be about Satan. There’s plenty of bands who can be obscure and straight-to-the-point with a peculiar image and, of course, very powerful music.”

That is how the Dusktone label announced the debut album from the Swiss black metal band Vígljós, and indeed, it is not about Satan. As signified by the album’s title itself — Tome I: apidæ — it’s about… bees.  But there aren’t many bands who could have made an album like this one.

Photos by Nicolas Gysin

We’ll let Vígljós explain it, in their own intriguing words:

When the first beams of light disperse the clouds in spring, the hive awakens from its deep slumber. The queen takes her throne, ruling to ensure an immortal legacy.

But soon the sky will darken from thick clouds of smoke and incenses, as three unholy beings emerge from within the fog. These apiarists will tell the stories of life, rise and decline in their own twisted way.

Feel the sweet stings of a servile and painfully joyous existence.

The titles of the album’s eight songs, all of which you’ll be able to hear below, trace this tale in much the same way as that description above, beginning with “Rays Of Light In Liquid Gold” and “Sweet Stings”, but ending with “To Die In A Flowerbed”. And following from one to the next proves to be a fascinating and fantastical experience. We can’t resist predicting that you’ll be stung by it.

Just as the tale itself twists from familiar life, ancient and vital to our own existence, and into the dark machinations of supernatural beings, so too does the music twist — repeatedly and in surprising ways.

That opening track rings and shimmers in the tones of a cracked cathedral organ, both entrancing and more than a little disturbing, beckoning but gloom-shrouded, and a thus a foreshadowing of things to come.

What immediately comes next, in “Sweet Stings”, is a sudden maelstrom of hammering and cantering drums, caustic screams, and equally caustic, acid-drenched riffing that throbs and… swarms.

The sound is raw and unhinged, violent but also jubilant, glorious but also tormented, primal in its grooves and as busy as (you know what) until the beats stalk and stagger, the bass murmurs, and the music descends into agony and gloom. Back and forth the music goes, bursting as the hive comes to life again, carefully augmented with synths, but again collapsing into sounds of hopelessness and despair.

A few things are immediately apparent from that first full song. It reveals the dynamism of Vígljós‘ songcraft, their favoritism for raw and nerve-wracking tones (but also glittering ones), their ability to intrigue the listener but also to cast a pall of darkness, and the utter insanity and shattering intensity of the vocals.

But that song doesn’t reveal everything that Vígljós have planned for us in their first tome.

As the album proceeds, they do continue to shift the sounds and the moods, to deploy percussive pounding you can feel in your belly and bones and vocals that sound like someone being de-fleshed with scalpels, and to create riffing that’s both stridently piercing and severely abrading.

But they also bring in elegant and ancient musical stylings that may invoke descriptions of medieval black metal among listeners, a counterpoint of sorts to the raw, ruinous, and primitive assaults they mount but also seamlessly in league with them, as well as grim and cruel slashing chords and elevations of morbid and mythic grandeur.

You might also pick out the use of a mellotron, which adds to the otherworldly aspects of the music, and soloing that could be from the devil’s own fiddle (see “The Apiarist”) or plucked strings reminiscent of a saz (see “Dance of the Bumblebee”) or massed horns that have been warped by time (“Raiding the Hive”) or brightly rippling tones suggestive of a mandolin (“Vígljós”). Especially because such instrumental accents are often surrounded by such brutally mangling and mauling sounds, they seize attention with even more striking effect.

(To be clear, we don’t really know what instruments were used; these are only speculative ideas).

You’ve been told where the tale leads — it is ultimately a narrative of decline, and the music moves there too. You can hear the vivid buzz of the bees rising and falling within “Raiding The Hive” but that song is near-apocalyptic in its bleakness and frighteningly turbulent in its upheavals, and the song which shares the band’s name is both a wild and exhilarating dance, with some of the most pulse-pounding drumwork on the album, but also the unfolding of a distressing calamity.

At the very end, “To Die In A Flowerbed” provides a final surprise. Using old stringed instrumentation and what might be an accordion, it sounds like an old folk lament, simple in its repeating refrains and broken in its heart. And somehow it makes sense as the denouement of the Tome I narrative.

All in all, we venture to guess that Vígljós‘ debut is unlike any other black metal record you’ve heard this year, as unusual as the subject matter of the tale it tells. It’s not easy listening, but if you can withstand the harshness of many of its ingredients, you’ll likely find yourself rooted in place ’til the bitter end.

Tome I: apidæ was recorded, mixed and mastered at Hutch Sounds Studio Oberwil by Marc Obrist (Zeal & Ardor) and it will be available on Vinyl, CD and Tape.

The release party of the album will be held at Tales Of Wrath Festival in Humbug, Basel, supporting Wake (Canada) on Saturday, May 11th.

PRE-ORDER:
https://dusktone.bandcamp.com/album/tome-i-apid

VÍGLJÓS:
https://linktr.ee/vigljos
https://www.facebook.com/vigljos