NIHILL’S VERDONKERMAAN: THE PERILS OF BELIEVING IN NOTHING
It’s impossible to mention Nihill without bringing up Dodecahedron. Well, no, it’s absolutely possible, but it’s harder now that the latter band have released one of the more fascinating and challenging metal albums of the year. The link between the two is Michiel Eikenaar, provider of decimated-throat vocals for both. And his penchant for darkness is nakedly apparent, topped only by former Bethlehem vocalist Ranier Landfermann or Anaal Nathrakh’s V.I.T.R.I.O.L. And in the context of Nihill’s wall of blackened noise, he’s a spokesman for existential and/or eternal suffering, a survivor of hell gurgling out what he saw. And while Nihill are already the focal point of the Netherlands’ avant-black metal scene (um, which may not be much of an achievement, really), hopefully Dodecahedron’s ascendancy doesn’t cause them to be swept under the rug, because… damn, they’re vicious. And on Verdonkermann, their latest, they constantly veer on the edge of chaos, but come off more fascinating than trying.
That being said, to put it eloquently, this is some noisy shit. While it has all the hallmarks of black metal — fuzzy, hypnotic guitars, murky production, and blastbeats — they’re pulled to their definitive extremes. The guitars exist as a part of a gargantuan wall of noise, recognizable riffs sometimes coming to the forefront but more often than not functioning as a part of an ambient cloud of sarin. And the drums are industrial in their rigid, militaristic form: the snare on “Vurr: the deathwish of resurrection.” follows an obsessively straight path as the noise it’s supporting moves with far less structure. In fact, any time Nihill is in blastbeat mode, the snare acts less as governing backing and instead as just another part of the unsettling whole. Verdonkermann has peaks and valleys, but for the most part, it finds its way back to its amorphous core of disorder.
The album’s most interesting moment comes about a third of the way through “Oerbron: Returning to the primal matter.”, where the chaos the album had been alluding to for the past 22 minutes comes to pass, culminating in a few minutes of unrestrained and directionless screaming and noise. While countless other bands play on the edge of this kind of unrest, one rarely hears them succumb to it. It’s a profoundly cathartic moment, like watching someone have their rock-bottom moment in real time. When the song reforms three-and-a-half minutes later, one dimly remembers where it had begun. It’s followed by “Gnosis Part IV”, six-plus minutes of whispered rambling. The victory here is that Nihill manage to make something captivating out of sheer formlessness. What’s essentially three-and-a-half minutes of anarchy sandwiched by a fractured black metal song then six minutes of ambient drone barely bubbling above what can be qualified as sound have meaning in the context of Verdonkermann.
Black metal, for all its unreasonably rigid ethos, is a surprisingly flexible genre: from its raw beginnings to thudding, mid-paced Celtic Frost worship to Norsecore to Autopsy-fellating blackened death to Emperor-style symphonic jaunts to Deathspell Omega. Everything Nihill does on Verdonkermann manages to fall under the BM umbrella, but they seem to be antagonistically testing the limits of how far out they can go before they stumble into noise music or dark ambience. Nihill are a band that can go anywhere they want and still retain control of what they want to be doing, even if it appears they aren’t. For other bands, this would be masturbatory experimentation; for Nihill, it’s a mission statement.
(4 out of 5 horns)
-SO
