In Hindsight is 10/10, we revisit albums that have not received the acclaim they deserve.
The US black metal band Ustalost have two albums under their belt but have not provided any information about themselves aside from two paragraphs on the Bandcamp page for Before the Glinting Spell Unvests. The project’s leader hasn’t given an interview concerning the project. Aside from a few reviews, Ustalost have a small digital footprint, and none of it is of their own creation. It’d appear that they are intentionally mysterious, except they’re openly related to one of New York’s finest black metal bands.
You don’t have to dig to find the truth. Ustalost was created by Will Skarstad as an outlet for concepts he deemed too indulgent for his other, more popular band, Yellow Eyes. His exact word was “decadent,” though that implies richness, like dark chocolate fudge, but that’s not exactly accurate, sonically speaking. The best way to begin understanding Skarstad’s intentions with Ustalost and his first album under that name, 2016’s The Spoor of Vipers, is through a comparison to Yellow Eyes. The difference between Ustalost and Yellow Eyes is nuanced, but it can be summarized as this–Ustalost is a solo project and Yellow Eyes is not.
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As elementary as that may seem, it represents an ideological difference between the two acts as the schism between Yellow Eyes and Ustalost, collaborative effort versus individual pursuit, solidifies when examining their music. Yellow Eyes’ guitars interact like the heads of a hydra, acting of their own accord yet attached to the same heart. It’s an attribute that must be mentioned when talking about Yellow Eyes until the end of time because, no matter how often their playing is brought up, it never feels like enough. The downside to the Skarstadian guitars amassing so much attention when discussing Yellow Eyes is that drummer Mike Rekevics does not receive his due. He is the sportscar engine of the machine, and because he’s constantly pushing the pace, the Skarstad brothers have the freedom to engage in their Magic: The Gathering card game of guitars. Alex DeMaria’s bass playing is understated but serves a crucial purpose–setting the ground floor. Yes, his performance is more function over fashion when compared to the other group members, but it’d feel rude not to include him because if you’re praising a group with four members and only highlighting three, then you’re bullying by omission.
Ustalost lacks that propulsive drumming and ecosystem-like guitarwork because, as stated earlier, Will Skarstad handles everything himself. Stripping down the band to a solo performance on The Spoor of Vipers did not result in a musically skeletal record. Quite the opposite. Free from playing in communion with a group, Skarstad indulged in the finer details of his knotty guitar work. Here, the guitar tracks clamor against each other in a manner not dissimilar to Fugazi of all acts, in that there’s a recognizable upper and lower register, though they often sound like magnets trying to rip themselves apart. When they meld together, like on “III,” they do so stubbornly. The longer the magnets are joined, the more uncomfortable their tension becomes. Though blast beats are implemented on the record, they’re muffled by the shoddy production, to the point that they serve to keep one engaged but never overstimulated. Synths then fill the dead air with kitsch and Gothicism. Like the rest of the palette, they are monotonous when viewed from a bird’s eye view, though upon closer inspection, they are anything but inert.
These aforementioned qualities imbue The Spoor of Vipers with a degree of melancholy. Fortunately, the record is more poignant than to settle for personifying a depressive state. The vocals reveal as much. They are shrill, spectral, and, most crucially, devoid of any melodramatics that point to overt moroseness. Their gleaming moment is their spotlight on “IV”, in which they appear as if they were howled minutes prior, their echoes only reaching the track now.
With those aspects in mind, The Spoor of Vipers reads as an inspection of Skarstad’s idea of decadence. Despite its lo-fi finish, the album doesn’t present like it was recorded in a basement for prosperity’s sake. Instead, it sounds like it was unearthed centuries after its completion: its meat picked off by time’s vultures, leaving only bones and hair, while its indulgent compositions, though remaining, lay distorted. The Spoor of Vipers professes that decadence leads to degradation, eventually becoming a perversion of itself. What was once opulent will lose its luster. The Spoor of Vipers arrived sounding aged to show that all we work for, all our wealth, all our vanity, will decay. What will remain is hallowed, caked with soot, and antagonistic.
Black metal and preservation is a subject too vast to examine here, what with original t-shirts and tapes still fetching ridiculous sums of money online and with rose-tinted glasses heralding a specific time and select sounds from the genre’s past, ignoring the mind-bending music that existed simultaneously with what would be codified as black metal’s canon sound, as if to remark that that history is not the one to be preserved. But, The Spoor of Vipers presents that ideology taken to its end, when one seeks only to enmesh oneself in one sound, constantly upping the dosage to the point of gluttony. With that goal, Ustalost imply a non-future wherein all that rusts away. There are no track names or discernable lyrics, after all. The Spoor of Vipers posits that regardless of how decadent those features were, be they ornate lyrics or mind-melting solos, they would fail to persevere. Or, if they were to survive, they would not do so with their original sheen.
Knowing how casual Skarstad is (every interview he’s done paints him as a chill dude), it’s likely The Spoor of Vipers was what Before the Glinting Spell Unvests claimed in its liner notes, just an experiment. A method to play metal. A way to unleash ideas that were too untethered for Yellow Eyes. But the fact that there is no premise here is where the melancholia arises. These connections made to The Spoor of Vipers are implied, forcing us to attain something from its carcass, or a reason for why we must not indulge overtly, lest we end up like this record–endlessly winding on a spool but with disheveled yarn from years of use.
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The Spoor of Vipers is available here through Sibir Records.
