Picture yourself in an ancient, alpine forest, subsumed in pre-dawn mist, with only the scant moonlight penetrating the wispy white tatters and the needles of the conifers above you. From the corner of your eye, you see a glint of excitement in the pale-lit glitter of your compatriot’s gaze. Your fingers, chilled by the crisp mountain air, tighten around your fire-hardened spear as the subtle hand signal of the elder dictates the next move. As dawn is creeping over the serrated mountaintop, the hunt begins again. This is the atmosphere conjured on Arkhaaik’s latest record, Uihtis. Written and vocalized entirely in a reconstructed, primeval Indo-European language, Uihtis (which translates to “The Hunt”) is a concept album about a Bronze Age hunt and subsequent ceremonial slaughter, and in a more metaphysical sense by describing the perennial hunting cycle of sun and moon.
Arkhaaik channel this Bronze Age spirit through their atavistic, folk-embellished blackened doom metal. On four long tracks, they ravage their audience with subterranean roars and slow, knuckle dragging riffs that are thick as primordial soup, alongside atavistic drumming and a varied selection of atmospheric, folky embellishments. Lofty concepts and con-lang shenanigans notwithstanding, this album rips like an angry cave bear when the riffs run rampant, truly walking with the beasts in its stankiest moments. The bass-heavy blackened doom riffing on “Hrkþos Heshr Hiagom” and “Hagrah Gurres” reminds me of Scáth Na Déithe, and in the more ritualistic arrangements the influence of Schammasch is clearly felt. Arkhaaik know how to set a mood and build a long form track up slowly while keeping the listener’s attention, which is a rare and precious trait. Channeling the patience and explosive ferocity of an ancient predator, they pounce halfway through album highlight “Hrkþos Heshr Hiagom” and unleash a humongous riff, solemnly cudgeling their unsuspecting prey back to the primeval jelly of mono-cellular life.
Aside from the instrumental successes, I’m also uniquely situated to enjoy the vocal delivery here. While all the lyrics are in a (re)constructed ancient language, the idiosyncrasies of the Swiss-German dialect of the Zurich area are clearly audible in the guttural plosives and constricted syllables full of heavy clusters and tongue twisting ellipses. I grew up hearing bits of those language spoken on my father’s side of the family, and while I never spoke it proficiently, this adds to the sense of mystery and hiraeth for a mythologized ancestry that permeates Uihtis.
Uihtis comprises four tracks, all around or over 10 minutes long, and all of a fairly similar sonic palette with tempo’s varying from slow to mid-paced and occasionally verging on blast-beats proper, mileage on this album will vary. If you—like me—like your blackened metal slow, menacing, brutal and infused with ancient shamanism, this is where you’ll find it. As final track “Kerhos Mehnsos” moves from tribal drumming and an instrument that lands somewhere between a birds’ call and my imagined reality of a woolly mammoth’s trumpeting roar, we are transported back to the sloping mountainside forest, and enter a cave where the morning’s prey is roasting merrily above a spitting fire. As this ancient community eats and shares the days stories, a solitary member sits off to the side, pressing their small, painted hand on the cave’s walls. Like those hands, still remaining to this day, Uihtis reaches out from the past, to the present, and back, tethering the listener to these ancient times and primal rituals.