DARKTHRONE
DARKTHRONE “It Beckons Us All”
By Octopi Mills
Opening with a swirling effect that has a sci-fi feel, so, in turn, comes "Howling Primitive Colonies". In some ways one might say there is a sort of formula present in all their albums or the last good many of them; a certain pace, sound, etc. that somehow came from their changes through the years. This can be heard in certain stylistic changes in tempo, theme, use of certain effects not so used in the past; these things are still shaped on this and the last album. It is most interesting watching a band voyage in search of something new in the ways of what they have known.
When one hears "Black Dawn Affiliation" one can only guess what all the lyrics are about; this is the charm though of the young metalhead that stayed his course through the big and the dumb and the great...that one's ideas forms like the scrawled logo and the rootish artwork that forms like stalactites of thought. Here in this manner things have aged and grown like the slow growth that becomes a building or structure covered in vine or choking sprawl. Riffs are like caves, jagged and gray, monotone. What has been called "mostly boring riffs" in a certain reference, makes sense here, but rides it in a slow sort of way that makes this album work. For some strange reason I recall a sort of vibe from John Carpenter's “The Thing”, though this may just be an outback delusion.
Something like "Eon 3" crawls around like an old demo track from the eighties and lumbers softly in slow winged invasion from far flung quarters and eats softly on the tender lawns of the mind. There are some stylistic things going on in pieces and parts here in the junkyard of scrap metal history; like adding a neon blue interior dash lighting to an old rusted farm truck or equipping an old land rover with an advanced air horn; nearly things as mundane as the scenario of seeing a man in a tie that has the glow of a pinball machine but not enough to be incriminated to going to the asylum for such thoughts. These sorts of little changes must be felt and heard both as one goes to the soft lights experiencing the flight of a moth to such things- things like synth or something akin to it, braver guitar piddling, etc. It's these little dressings and appointments that lend a dim sort of new fascination to what they have been doing. They are slowly going somewhere else, as seen slowly in the last three albums now.
"The Bird People of Norway" sees a good video to the album's release, a vintage feeling that gives that isolated, raw and cold sense of being lost and in dark nature that DARKTHRONE has always captured through their own means. One can hear Norway in their sound...the sea, the cold, the dark and this sort of maturity is both one of wisdom and adventure but also in the paradox of tom-foolery and mastery. In their own strange and slow tube work of songs they have managed to finally culminate something more interesting than in years over the grand spread of things. I must say the last two albums seem to run close to this new sort of frontier. But in "The Heavy Hand" you will hear the lumbering Tom Warrior tick that burns out into the cocking around of bending chords and if there was a downfall to their work this can certainly be where it gets overdone since times of old where it nearly becomes theft and the outright parroting of something that becomes so monotonous and boring that it appears as a trademark that gets quite over whored. One must almost roll it over and check it for bedsores...this is not paid for by the state or insurance but befalls the charity of the listener.
"The Lone Pines of a Lost Planet" has the feel of a young man plucking around staring at a pine forest near a lake and forces itself on the listeners ear as is one is paying the expense of listening to him play for the first time. It must be said though, that the title of the song and all these things set the atmosphere for something...interesting. This is achieved in a low brow sort of way, however, and if it were a film the cast are those boring structures of riffs that sound like someone screwing around with power chords too much . It is here that the child like wonder of just playing those boring riffs are used as something like Lincoln logs to a child as they used them to build their very own universes and expand upon the known planes of existence. Almost always this is at the listener's expense. This time around, and maybe before (I'd have to go back and listen), they have managed to make it quite a bit more interesting. The last track becomes like some weird, unexpected fantasy tale like someone who read Jack Vance and came from a Lovecraftian background but submitted in the Weird Science fiction column in terms of entry and exploration. These are good things here if one digs, and a sound album has come from this.