Beherit - Engram

October 5, 2009

Reviewer: Matt

Fourteen years since their last album and Beherit are still schooling the world on black metal done right.  The hugely influential and highly polarizing Finnish masters of primal black metal and ambient “dark ritual music” are in top form, releasing what is not only the best “reunion” album of the most recent spate, but, remarkably, what is arguably the best album of their career.

Engram is the culmination Beherit’s widely imitated techniques: the stripped-down, infectious riffing from Oath of Black Blood; the chilling atmosphere and epic emotiveness of Drawing Down the Moon; and the dense, multilayered arrangements of Electric Doom Synthesis.  Engram shows just how ahead of their time Beherit was in the early nineties. Where the brilliant songwriting of their early albums was obscured by shoddy production and often sloppy musicianship, contemporary bands with greater instrumental proficiency but a fraction of the songwriting skill strive unsuccessfully to produce albums as charismatically evil as Beherit’s.  And though ambient music is the style with which hordes of black metal musicians seek to integrate with their metal sound or supplement their discography with “non-metal” albums, few in this bloated population have created anything as complex and evocative as Beherit’s ambient albums.  Now having honed their skill to perfection and with black metal long past its creative peak, Beherit thoroughly trounce all the imitators.  Engram is the most effective fusion of ambient songwriting techniques with black metal since Hvis Lyset Tar Oss and unequivocally, at the time of this writing, the best black metal album I’ve heard this year.

While the razor sharp Bathory- and Hellhammer-inspired riffs and the savage vocals are the most immediate aspects, and due to their relative simplicity and repetitiveness make this an easy album to write off as amateurish, a close listen reveals masters at work, creating countermelody through subtly layered keyboards and unconventional instrumentation.  Best exemplifying this technique is the mammoth fifteen minute final track “Demon Advance,” a quintessential “trance inducing” black metal epic.  The bass guitar is prominent at the front of the mix, driving the song with a simple and repetitive melody; multiple converging and diverging layers of ambient and symphonic keyboards sustain a transcendental atmosphere; and guitars swirl in the background, painting the song with a heavy texture.

For those less accustomed to such fearlessly experimental composition, there is no shortage of less non-traditional black metal assaults.  The album opens with “Axion Heroine,” one of the best songs of the album.  Beginning with a laid back guitar riff intimately intertwined in a simple keyboard line, the song explodes into savagery before rhythmically deconstructing into an even more deeply layered variation of the first theme.  Most of the following tracks construct ambient music through repeating cascades of fast and brutal guitar riffs layered upon each other, with “Destroyer of Thousand Worlds” and “Suck My Blood” being the best and most representative of this approach.   

The album flies by surprisingly fast, particularly with the first six tracks totaling less than thirty of the album’s forty two minutes and the middle track “Pagan Moon” eating up over seven of those minutes.  With the exception of that track and several breaks into ritual chanting in “Pimeyden Henki,” Engram is a furious affair.  Aggressive and brimming with hatred, it should satisfy all fans of so-called “raw black metal.”  And if Engram is not Beherit’s best, then it is certainly the most listenable.  The awful claustrophobic and fuzzy sound of their black metal masterpieces is gone, replaced by a vibrant sound that maintains the characteristic rawness of the genre while maintaining sufficient clarity to reveal Engram’s compositional depth.

The inescapable question is whether Engram is a classic, and the answer is not an easy one to give.  In terms of craftsmanship, Engram is the most solid album of Beherit’s career.  It is not as revolutionary as any of their prior work, and in a grossly oversaturated scene it is unlikely to be as lasting and influential, but Engram is undoubtedly the single black metal album to hear this year.

Release Date: April 9th, 2009
Label: Spinefarm Records

TRACK LISTING

1.  Axiom Heroine
2.  Destroyer of Thousand
     Worlds
3.  All in Satan
4.  Pagan Moon
5.  Pimeyden Henki
6.  Suck My Blood
7.  Demon Advance

Total playing time: 43:02

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