Editor's note: this another article submitted to Heavy Blog by Violet Palmer, who is also a phenomenal black metal artist working under the name Wolven Daughter. Check out her first essay for us here! The author would also like to add that she is not herself Christian - and yet the perspective of Christian Black Metal remains.
A tall, thin man, dressed in black, sits at a table in a darkened room, caressing the stem of a full glass of red wine. Not looking at the interviewer sitting across from him, nor at the camera focused on his shadowy face, he stares off into the distance as the interviewer asks, almost nervously, about the black metal band he sings for. What is their primary ideology, what are the main ideas that fuel the band's music? The man, still not deigning to look at his questioner, is silent for a full ten seconds before softly answering with one word.
“Satan.”
The man is, of course, Ghaal, former Gorgoroth and current Ghaals Wyrd vocalist. The interview, featured in Sam Dunn's documentary Metal: A Headbanger's Journey, has over the years gained a certain amount of infamy for Ghaal's strange and off-putting demeanor, and one could argue that it's become emblematic of black metal and its relationship with the rest of the genre: weird and anti-social, delighting in the unease of its listeners, with the Devil himself given pride of place as the supreme symbol of the music.
Since its very beginnings black metal and Satanism have been nearly synonymous. One only has to look at the ugly, leering goats that grace the covers of the first Bathory and Venom albums, or the sensationalist Kerrang headline that introduced black metal to the wider world with “ARSON...DEATH...SATANIC RITUAL...The Ugly Truth About Black Metal.” Right there are the three things any random metalhead knows about the subgenre. Church burnings, murders and suicides, and Devil worship.
But that is, of course, not the whole story. Every genre of music, no matter how simple and one-note it seems to outsiders, contains multitudes, and black metal is no different. Even in the early days, with the Satanic panic surrounding the scene in Norway at its height, second-wave stalwarts Immortal and Enslaved famously eschewed the diabolic themes of some of their contemporaries, instead drawing inspiration from the harsh Scandinavian landscape and its rich vein of history and mythology. A couple years later, Austrian band Summoning would make their name with epic Tolkien-inspired black metal, but without the occult pagan trappings of the more notorious Burzum.
And in 1994, the year that saw the release of such classic albums as Transilvanian Hunger, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, and In the Nightside Eclipse, a death metal drummer named Jayson Sherlock would make perhaps the biggest challenge to Satan's dominion over black metal with the release of Hellig Usvart, the first Christian black metal album.
“Within the black metal scene...all I could see was a bleak, dark, hopeless, lifeless and negative void. All I wanted to do was to shine a light into that darkness.”
So said Sherlock in a 2006 interview. While initially thought by some as parody, the impetus behind Hellig Usvart seems to be a sort of evangelism. “The intention was to give hope and a godly alternative to those people that needed it,” says Sherlock in the same interview. “To give them truth, and then they can decide how they wanted to proceed.”
Several people proceeded to send the record label death threats; the effect was perhaps not what he had hoped.
Sherlock may have been hoping to preach to lambs gone wayward, but his bigger impact was undeniably inspiring the already-existing flock of Christians with an affinity for the darker side of creation to start their own projects, creating the oft-maligned, some say oxymoronic, subgenre of “Christian black metal,” or “unblack” metal, as Sherlock himself called it. Curiously, Sherlock himself is one of those that insists that Christian black metal is a contradiction in terms, and denies that Hellig Usvart is black metal at all.
“I do NOT believe it is possible for Christian metal music to be truly 'black'...the dark, grim, horrific 'anti-God' themes...coupled with the higher pitched shrill raspy vocals, the blast beats, and the unmistakable chainsaw guitar sounds all merge to create the BM sound...it is the sound and the 'dark feeling' that truly defines what BM is, and the lyrics contribute to this. True BM I believe, is without light, void of hope, therefore Horde can never be classified as 'Holy Black'. Horde contains lyrics in opposition to darkness. In my opinion, 'Holy Black' cannot exist. Darkness disappears when light is present, the two cannot coexist.”
Interesting. What do we make of that? Well, let's start by taking a look at the album itself.
It certainly walks and talks like a black metal album. The production is deliciously raw, the song titles have all the subtlety of a sledgehammer (“Invert the Inverted Cross,” “Crush the Bloodied Horns of the Goat,” “Release and Clothe the Virgin Sacrifice”), and the vocals sound like Sherlock is gargling glass. The whole atmosphere of the album is dirty. Grimy. Like an old, unused basement, cobwebs filling the corners, mold growing on some boxes against the wall, the smell of cat piss emanating from the crawlspace.
In short, the album is dark and inhospitable, as black metal traditionally is. And to be frank, the lyrics contribute nothing to this.
I've never found lyrics that important in any genre of music, being mostly here for the music itself, but this is especially the case when it comes to black metal. Ninety percent of the time the vocals are unintelligible, and it's not uncomon for bands to decline to publish their lyrics altogether. If lyrical content has any effect on whether an album is “true” black metal or not, I would posit that is soley in the mind of the lyricist.
And even if we narrow “lyrics” down to just “song titles,” the part most easily understood, we find them, in fact, blunt and contemptuous, delivered with the haughtiness of any black metal album. One can easily imagine Sherlock as a sinister preacher, of the “sinners in the hands of an angry God” type, solitary, arrogant, and self-righteous, as he howls madly against the oncoming tide in an attempt to “Silence the Blasphemous Chanting.” The message might be different, but the attitude remains the same.
Sonically, the album brings to mind the extremely rough production of Live in Leipzig, supposedly recorded on a boombox. Sinister guitars, their notes halfway discernable through the crackling fuzz, play and weave among goulish snarls and blasting drums dry as a dessicated corpse. It perhaps is a little heavier on brutality over atmosphere than most black metal of the time, but we can put that down to Sherlock's origins in death metal. The album absolutely checks all the boxes for a black metal album.
And yet.
I can't deny that to me, anyway, the album lacks a certain something that made albums like De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas and Transilvanian Hunger true classics, that black spark that makes the hairs on your arms stand on end and chills run down your spine. The sense that you're not listening to music played on instruments by humans, but something truly inhuman and unreal. Perhaps it's simply knowing that Sherlock, although a fan of black metal, came to the genre as an outsider, rather presumptously attempting to offer an “godly alternative” to the hopeless void that he saw. One gets the sense that he understood and respected the musical conventions of the genre, but lacked the true inner fire that came through in the classic albums of Mayhem and Darkthrone.
So is it, then, not black metal after all?
Well if it's not, then honestly neither are the vast majority of the albums in the genre. Countless black metal records have been made by people copying the classics without really being able to harness what made them great. That feeling, as Sherlock might call it, is what makes an album stand the test of time and become legendary, not what makes an album black metal to begin with. Hellig Usvart is a black metal album, it's just not a particularly memorable one. It's less of a true heir to Live in Leipzig and more along the lines of the more forgettable 90s releases (Thirst's The Might of the Pagan Belief or Mastiphal's Sowing Profane Seed come to mind). If it had been a Satanic album, it would have been pretty thorougly uninteresting.
There are those who would say that Satanism is the entire point, however, and that no amount of raw guitars or anguished shrieks can make an album black metal if it's not glorifying the Devil. Euronymous held this position, at least for a period of time, and a certain subset of black metal artists and fans have historically agreed. Said Arioch of Funeral Mist in an interview with Slayer Magazine in 2000, "A band that claims to play black metal must always have Satanism and nothing but Satanism as the highest priority in their music and concept as well as in their personal lives." Erik Danielsson of Watain remarked in 2013, speaking of his own band, “Our whole anatomy, our bones and our spine all relate to one same source: the Satanic ideal. It is diabolical music with a magikal and transcendental intent. And that to me is very much what defines a black metal band.”
So Immortal and Summoning aren't black metal, two bands who, as mentioned earlier, completely avoided any Satanic or antireligious themes and still became seminal bands in the genre's history? According to Abbath, one of Immortal's founding members, “The Satan part of black metal has never been our true belief. We follow our own path.”
Satyr of Satyricon, who remembers many nights debating philosophy with Euronymous in the Helvete shop, concurs. “At no point did I ever say I was a devil-worshipper or a Satanist. Rather, the contrary, I said that it was too primitive and wasn’t my cup of tea, and that it was just religion organised in a slightly more loose way than other forms of religion.”
While I'm not denying Satanism's obvious importance to both the founding and contiued existence of the black metal genre, the idea that diabolical beliefs were or are a prerequesite for making “legitimate' black metal has obviously in no way been a universal notion (again, try to claim today that Immortal aren't black metal, as Euronymous once did). So Sherlock might claim black metal must necessarily be “anti-God,” but many even in the original scene would have disagreed with him.
Especially since Satyr continues, “Many of those people weren’t really into it either, but pretended they were because Euronymous of Mayhem told them to.”
Interesting. We find this accusation echoed by other people involved in the scene during that time. Metallion, editor of Slayer magazine, stated in Lords of Chaos, “I don't think Satanism has been that important besides being a flirtation with the occult symbols and as a concept for the lyrics...I think very few black metal musicians are involved in the secrets of the black arts. Of course some are, but they keep it to themselves.” M. W. Daoloth of the Greek black metal band Necromantia called the majority of Satanism in black metal for “shock value,” and describes genuine practicioners as “few,” while admitting that some of those did end up in prominent bands.
One such true believer, at least in those days, was widely accepted to be Ishahn of Emperor. When asked to describe the ideology of the early black metal scene, Ishahn responded, “I think black metal tried to concentrate more on just being 'evil' than having a real Satanic philosophy,” describing the genre in more general terms as “in opposition to society, a confrontation to all the normal stuff.”
Ok, the raison d'être of metal as a whole, taken up to eleven, fair enough. So the majority of black metal artists may have been far from true believers, but Satan still functioned as an effective symbol of both anti-Christianity and anti-society. And with the vehemence they attacked it, whether viewing it as having usurped the old heathen religion and having robbed modern Norway of its pagan heritage, or just holding the “herd mentality” of the religion and its adherents in contempt, Christianity in 90s Norway must have been particularly oppressive, right?
Actually it was, according to Ihsahn himself, “not strict at all,” and the country was considered to be far more culturally Christian than anything else, the actual practice of the religion not being of particular interest to most Norwegians.. When asked if the motivation was more personal, if the members of the scene were rebelling against a smothering religious upbringing, Ihsahn responded that neither his nor the parents of people he knew in the scene were particularly devout.
Speaking with disgust about the “common people” (Christians) of Norway, Ihsahn's bandmate Samoth, who participated in the church burnings, stated that “They are so caught up with being normal and being like everyone else, so they baptize their children in the church for that reason only...Most of these people have no strong religious belief, they just do it.”
Christians he may be speaking of, but Samoth could just as easily have been describing some of his contemporaries, those indicted by Satyr above as professing true Satanic belief under duress from Euronymous. Clutching an inverted crucifix in a photoshoot so the guy who runs the record shop will think you're cool is hardly the strong-willed, individualist mindset that Samoth would have in black metal. What is, though, is doing your own thing regardless of pressure from your surroundings to do otherwise.
I have far more respect for bands like Horde, who carved out a unique and foundational place in black metal by following his own darkness, than for a “kvlt” band who makes the same black metal album that 20 bands before them made and 20 bands after them will make again, simply because that is the done thing in the scene, or because that's how Euronymous said it should be thirty years ago. Say what you will about Jayson Sherlock and his motivations behind creating Hellig Usvart, the man was not overly concerned with what people thought of him, or how much “kvlt” cred the album would give him. That, to me, is how the spirit of black metal burns even in releases that seem to deny it with their very breath. Treading your own path, following your own personal black light towards the raw, uncompromising music that YOU want to make. THAT is what makes black metal “true,” not how cool the corpsepaint looks, or how many songs reference the Devil, or whether or not the artist actually has a serious practice in their private life that informs those references. And this is why Hellig Usvart made such a mark.
Spiritually, if not necessarily musically, Sherlock's album spat in the face of black metal tradition in the same way that black metal spat in the face of the muscial traditions of death metal when it developed its striking new sound. And in the same way that Dead and Fenriz and Euronymous inspired generations of bands to take up the torch, Jayson Sherlock inspired Antestor, Crimson Moonlight, Frosthardr, and many others.
The existence of the current Christian scene is perhaps the biggest argument for Christian black metal there is. The truer than thou crowd can whine about how it's not real black metal all they like (and they will, I have seen it), bands like Exalted Savior or A Hill to Die Upon do not care. Drummer Michael Cook of the latter band remarks, “I think the idea that black metal must have an ideological component is absurd...it's all just rock n' roll.”
Call it rock n' roll or The Black Flame ov Set or whatever, it's that spirit that keeps all of us black metal nerds coming back, for that fix that we can't get in the normal world. It's that something that shines through in every (for lack of a better term) “true” band, no matter what the lyrics discuss or what key the band plays in. It's a combination of passion and an ear for the macabre and unsettling, in all the myriad ways that that feeling manifests. Through Satan, through Death, through winter and mountain and wind.
And ocassionally, through God.