In Hindsight is 10/10, we revisit albums that have not received the acclaim they deserve.
How enigmatic do you like your black metal artists? Do you need to know the people under the paint job, to poke at their histories and creative process? Or do you want their music delivered anonymously: an unmarked tape in a plastic bag, with a couple of foraged feathers thrown in for maximum found footage mise-en-scène?
To the uninitiated, in 2016, all that Urzeit gave you was 7 letters. The Portland band declared themselves as R.F., A.L.N, and M.S., and got on with things. Maintaining that mystique was hard in 2016 though, as black metal found itself the beneficiary of a new wave of writers and bloggers working with increasingly broad outlets inviting them to talk… about… metal? Seems wild (if you need proof, here’s the excellent Ben Handelman covering this very band on VICE!) All of this is to say it didn’t take an especially resourceful sleuth to unpack who Urzeit were, and in doing so, gain some fascinating insight into the context of their single full-length release, Anmoshka.
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Keen nerds among us will have already identified from the above that A.L.N still produces music as the sole recording artist in Mizmor, but connecting the dots between him and the other members of Urzeit casts light on the output of nearly a dozen hyper-productive bands that operated largely in the 2010s. R.F was a founding member of the militantly publicity-averse Vrasubatlat label and played in a number of related bands including (but not limited to) Ash Borer, Adzalaan, Triumvir Foul, and Utzalu. M.S played in these bands also, and more recently plays drums in the brilliant Excarnated Entity.
Anmoshka feels like a counterpoint to the output of those bands; around this time Ash Borer and Mizmor were pushing thrillingly into grandiosity, exploring arrangements and moods that laid bare the growing technical and artistic expertise of those involved. You have to imagine that in crafting those huge statements, ideas and music were also created that didn’t fit and didn’t speak the same language. They were amputated and left to roll off the table, squelch across the floorboards and into the gutter – this is where Anmoshka lives. The album title references the Hindu concept of breaking free from the cycle of life and death, the ultimate goal of spiritual realisation. Specifically, the album refers to the inability to do so, the implication being to remain of the earth, and to therefore suffer without end. The music reflects this–black metal with strong melodies, made caustic by means of mid-fi production, and a vocal performance like you’ve never heard from A.L.N.
The songs on Anmoshka typically limit themselves to a handful of ideas, leaving it to the force and charisma of their delivery to add variance, and when it’s at its best on songs like “Anmoshka” and Bellisunya,” it’s incredibly fun to get swept up in it, to feel the same release as the band, gathered to give voice to their base instincts. Presented as an album, Anmoshka nevertheless alludes to an on-and-off recording process. Songs push up against one another, starting and stopping abruptly, and refusing to adhere to their neighbours. More than any of the music itself, this lends the album a punkish presentation, complementing the speed and conviction with which these songs are driven into your memory.
There’s a lot of music to immerse yourself in here. Maybe one of the only aspects that gets lifted from those mainline acts earlier mentioned is that song durations creep up beyond what you might expect from music this urgent and violent. It makes for a distinctive, peculiar listen: we call this column Hindsight is 10/10, and on the right day this album gets there. There are also listens that land at 7/10, when you’re not in the headspace for brutality and repetition, but it always sounds vital. Most importantly, it’s an album that feels like the eye of a storm of creativity in which, for a brief moment in time, a small group of musicians sought to present a cohesive and comprehensive vision of the underground, across an explosion of bands and releases that, to this day, lurk at the fringes of extreme music in a sodden grotto all of their own.
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Anmoshka is available here.
