Dodheimsgard

Supervillain Outcast (2007)

Supervillain Outcast is themed around the apocalypse, an apocalypse brought on not by natural events such as asteroids or plague, but by humanity itself, tearing itself apart from within, drowning in its own filth. The music itself has that blackness of the Black Metal of the past, but it comes from a different place, it is a void not from the traditional ‘evil’ but from the entanglement of the individual present in late capitalism – a humanity realising its ‘values’ are meaningless and having itself consumed by the virtualisation and mechanisation of its approach to life.

The band uses production values that have a lot in common with turn of the millennium metal-core or technical death metal – clean and crisp, almost to the point of sterility. However given the themes of the album,  this approach to the sound mix has great power here. As you can expect, given the focus on collapse and dysfunction driven by post-modernism induced paranoia and mental disintegration, the structure of the music also mimics its themes – in a lot of these songs there is no real central musical idea or melody. Instead there are a series of mazes, that breed chaos and disorder – ideas that collapse under themselves, disintegrating into confusion and anarchy. Generally when the music reaches these chaotic points is where it is granted its tag of being ‘avant garde’ – the use of perplexing dissonance, strange passages where the keyboards puzzle over-the-top of off-kilter guitars etc. There is also nods to other genres in the music, for example there are hints of punk vibes in the vocals, use of keyboards/sampling/effects that originate from the industrial themed music of certain electronic music styles. The bass playing also occasionally descends into a dark, pulsating groove, echoing styles of rock that fall outside of the bounds of Metal.

Dodheimsgard's major strength is their ability to create an experience based on the feelings of chaos, eeriness, paranoia, mental disintegration, and absurdity. All of those moods/themes that sum up the experience of living in the modern world so perfectly. A time where all concrete meanings (traditions) of the past have decayed and all that remains is a mass of ever-changing images/symbols, of which are echoes or simulations of something else, estranged from their former reality.