(On June 14th Time To Kill Records will release the fifth album by the Italian black metal band Darkend, and today we’re premiering its full stream, preceded by an extensive review by our writer (and longtime Darkend fan) DGR.)
Even though it would be wonderful for every group we cover to achieve massive stardom, playng to gigantic crowds and existing as a perpetual part of the cultural zeitgeist – since that seems to be the only way we can completely guarantee someone is making a decent living playing music these days – a few artistic benefits are afforded to musicians who are currently dwelling in the underground, ever on the slow burn and amassing more and more notoriety over time, as opposed to a sudden viral explosion that sees them top of the world one week and then trying to maintain that for years afterward.
One of those is that you are free to move within the realms of an artistic spectacle far more than you might otherwise be given room to; every album becomes an opportunity to swing for the fences and execute upon ambitious and grand ideas while also giving room to reinvent oneself as much as you feel.
We bring this up in part because Italy’s Darkend have had a near-two-decade career at this point and it is one that has allowed them to be increasingly ambitious over the course of five albums, while remaking themselves into as much of a spectacle as they are a musical act within that time.
Many a black metal group over the years has cited their specific live performances as being part of some sort of ‘ritual’ but Darkend have done their best to make that into a truth each time they’ve released an album and then taken the stage. They aren’t a band that has ever been comfy resting on their laurels either, as each of their releases since their first full-length way back in 2010 has seen some sort of artistic evolution, if not some sort of out-of-left-field gamble to keep people on their toes.
In the case of Darkend this has involved a process of constant honing-down and finer-forging than on the album prior. The group’s first-full length Assassine for instance was a weighty eleven songs and about an hour and five worth of music, yet their album previous to the one we’re discussing today – 2019’s Spiritual Resonance – is only six songs and a little over forty minutes. Darkend have over time managed to master the art of reaching further than ever before while also condensing their music down into some of the densest works they could possibly create.
Even with all of this in mind, it should be stated that it still takes quite a bit of steel-bodied fortitude for a band to release an album in terms of pacing and track number like Darkend have with their newest album Viaticum, coming in at only five songs yet still punching in with a similar heft as its predecessor, providing over forty-one minutes’ worth of music.
Darkend perform this act by bookending their album with the two longest songs of the Viaticum collection, the “Multitude” suite of music, with three songs in between that could go toe-to-toe with Nile and their recent song-naming revelations for some of the wordiest titles out there. Opening song “In My Multitude” sails well into the eight-and-a-half minute range and closing song “In Your Multitude” is just a hair past fifteen minutes. Over half of the album’s run-time is prescribed to these two songs alone and they’re the ones upon which the whole album spins its gears.
You’d be well within your rights to assume that those two songs would be the only two tied together thematically, with the three in the center acting as separate events of their own accord, but in Darkend‘s case they’re once again doing their damndest to wrap each song into one another. Viaticum isn’t really five different songs as much as it is one overarching concept piece, in the same way Darkend‘s previous two releases were. What has changed now is that in the time since Spiritual Resonance, Darkend seem to be even more free to carve back and also experiment with much of their sound. Within just the five songs of Viaticum here, you have Darkend at their most expansive but also the most traditionally ‘black metal’ the group have been in some time.
Darkend are of a class of artist for whom genre conventions have become just another weapon in the arsenal rather than the blueprint by which they are defined. The core of their sound is entwined with the reactionary gothic tradionalism of the corpse-painted crowd, and vocalist Animae is well-versed in the art of the belfry-haunting shriek and tightened-rasp, but the group’s last four releases have seen Darkend casting their net quite wide and absorbing enough influences that you could describe them any other time as writing musical acting pieces.
It’s why a song like “An Incautious Exhumation of What Lies Beneath Forgotten Ground” in the second spot on Viaticum‘s collection is a surprise since its the most raw Darkend have gotten in a few releases. It’s the most tooth and claw, rusted nail and fang, that Darkend have created within Viaticum as well. It’s the shortest song at just under five minutes and is the high-tempo, high-speed blaster of the siblings. But it’s multipurpose as well since it follows the grander traditions of the album’s opening song and also thematically ties into the middle-three bunch that aren’t part of the “Multitude” batch of songs. For the most part it is white-hot fire and infernal in its stances, yet Darkend can never resist allowing a song to grow into something more, so even “An Incautious Exhumation of What Lies Beneath Forgotten Ground” has a little room to get adventurous with its guitar work – one of a handful of times wherein the guitar leads are directly up front.
Even though Darkend are a spectacle of a band they do have their own traditions as well, and one that sees its resurrection once again is the band stepping up to the podium to address their crowd. “De Masticatione Mortuorum In Tumulis” provides that opportunity, constructed mostly out of a melancholy mid-tempo riff and commanding vocal style twisting around the words “Thou shalt…” over and over in its introductory segment. Darkend have used the idea of full-worship of the dark arts before in previous releases, but Viaticum‘s thematic concept allows “De Masticatione Mortuorum In Tumulis” to be the most fully realized version the band have done yet.
Each song within this album is interwoven into one another, either by scene-setting segue or actual leads and motifs that carry over from song to song. Laying at the mid-point of the album as it does, “De Masticatione Mortuorum In Tumulis” does a good job closing out a musical Act One while moving people into the second half with the more traditionally chaotic “An Ancient Plague Has Silently Worn Our Garments as Its Throne” as its lead horse.
It may seem at this point that Darkend have achieved some sort of prestige within their Viaticum universe but like “An Incautious Exhumation” before it, “An Ancient Plague” is relatively straightforward and sinister in its attack. Partly because, much like how its aforementioned sibling is preceded by “In My Multitude”, “An Ancient Plague…” is followed by Viaticum‘s most interesting and arguably strongest song “In Your Multitude”.
Which means it is now time to address the “Multitude” collective of music, the two start and stop points for Viaticum as a whole. “In My Multitude” has a lot of work laid out before it, and for the most part answers that call with relative ease. There has been a decent-sized gap between releases for Darkend, and returning with five songs means that you’re setting some lofty expectations for yourself. This, is of course, before people realize that those five songs are fairly lengthy but it’s a high jump for some people to get over that initial sticker shock when it is often assumed that “more time = more music”. Creativity is a maelstrom of a mistress and clearly hasn’t worked that way for centuries, but at this point it’s almost primal for someone to fall into that pit.
“In My Multitude” lays the groundwork for Viaticum as a larger beast, which means many of the ideas that you’ll hear within the mid-section of the album – which we’ve whirlwind tap-danced our way through already – are laid forth within it. Not only that, but having to be the first song on the album means it’s also the requisite musical welcoming mat. It gets the job of reassuring people that the band are still a spectacle worth paying attention to, and again, “In My Multitude” answers that call with ease.
It starts by using the classic maneuver of launching the band into space at the flash of a green light. If you were panicked that Darkend would dwell in the mid-tempo caverns of the black metal world for an entire release, “In My Multitude” is happy to drag that assumption along the ground for a while. Darkend pack a lot into “In My Multitude” and its eight minutes, using what feels like every second and allowing almost no room to breathe – which stands in contrast to its closing sibling at the end of the album. While “In My Multitude” gets to be the twisted narrator and opener of Viaticum, “In Your Multitude” takes the honor of being Viaticum‘s summation and mournful closer.
“In Your Multitude” is the sort of song that could almost be an EP on its own. Clocking in at fifteen minutes, this is the song that gives Viaticum most of its weight. Darkend perform an interesting act here as it would be tempting to see an over fifteen minute run time for a song and guess that, much like the rest of the album, Darkend have packed this thing to the gills with material and created a monstrously large piece of art. “In Your Multitude” isn’t quite that – it’s correct to view it as an expansive number and even commend them for making fifteen minutes seem like nothing, but where “In Your Multitude” throws its wrench in the works is that for the most part it is a slow, mournful, dirge of a song that crawls through its opening moments.
Darkend use a few weapons in their arsenal here to make “In Your Multitude” work, turning it into one of the most organic songs within Viaticum‘s reaches. Every part that appears within the song grows naturally out of something else and each element plays out as if it belonged within “In Your Multitude” from the get-go; nothing just suddenly appears. It is a journey of the song and easily the highlight of Viaticum as an album. You almost don’t notice that you’ve segued into it with the way Viaticum is laid out. Things take a turn for the somber and maybe three minutes in is when you realize you’re no longer within the infernal and blackened abyss of the spectacle that is “An Ancient Plague…” at song four, and that you’re now deep within the well of the album’s closer.
Within the collective lexicon that is Darkend‘s overall discography, Viaticum sits comfortably well. The band have long proven themselves to be capable of the ambitious sort of spectacle that they’ve oft-imagined themselves being, and Viaticum proves that they’re still plenty willing to take a gamble for the sake of their overall art. The five songs present here are well-distinct from each other sound-wise yet flow quite well into each another – a credit to Darkend‘s aforementioned work to try and tie Viaticum together as a larger ‘whole’. You could easily lose yourself in the full forty-one minutes this album asks of you, as it continually contorts itself into elements familiar from Darkend‘s past albums as well as providing newer takes on the overall style.
Darkend have used their take on black metal’s overwhelming theatrics as a true weapon throughout their career and Viaticum is the latest arrow to be notched in the band’s musical bow. They’ve crafted five fantastic songs and even have one that could stand well on its own and hog a lot of the spotlight in that mix. While it’s been about four and a half years since Darkend‘s last issuance with Spritual Reasonance, Viaticum proves itself to be well worth the wait.
Time To Kill is releasing Viaticum on jewel-case CD, vinyl LP, and digital formats. Check the links below for more info. We will also share the words of Darkend about their new record:
Our fifth album Viaticum marks first of all a rupture with the “symphonic black metal” elements that characterized part of our previous discography. This transformation, already commenced with Spiritual Resonance, has proceeded further through a line-up change, with Nothingness replaced by Acamar for all the guitar duties. Eventually Acamar took part in the recording process, giving his contribution with arrangements, all the guitar solos and some riffs.
Viaticum is an essential oeuvre, crafted giving priority to primal and profound means of expression in an effort to condense and capture their deep-rooted meanings and richness. It is a record that invites the listener to actively participate in its developments, welcoming its emotions and eventually embrace a liberating catharsis through their release. It is an oeuvre that prompts to abandon yourself to the conflict to rise again in peace.
PRE-ORDER:
https://timetokillrecords.com/collections/darkend
https://darkend.bandcamp.com/album/viaticum
DARKEND:
https://darkend.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/darkendofficial
https://www.instagram.com/darkend_official