(Andy Synn explores the new album from the shapeshifting sultans of strange, Dødheimsgard)
There’s an unfortunate tendency, as I’m sure many of you aware, among some of the more… ahem… self-consciously “Avant-Garde” members of the Metal community to try a little too hard to convince everyone how progressive, how clever, and how creative they are, rather than letting their work simply speak for itself.
Whether that’s due to a lack of confidence – or an over-abundance of it – is always up for debate, but the truth is it’s almost always better to show rather than tell, and if you’re more interested in making solipsistic statements and delivering pretentious proclamations about your own intelligence, then… well, that says a lot, doesn’t it?
Dødheimsgard, however, have always come by their weirdness honestly, and their unwillingness to conform has never come across as contrived or calculated, but simply as an organic expression of their own unique oddness.
And Black Medium Current is a sublime space oddity of a very special sort, no doubt about it, that may one day be held up as the band’s de facto magnum opus.