The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Almost every black metal album claims a theme, which is why almost none of them is a concept album. A theme is a subject the lyrics keep returning to, and the genre has been drowning in those since 1991: winter, the north, the old gods, the burning of a church, the death of a faith. A concept record is something narrower and rarer. It is an album whose form has been altered by the story it carries, where the sequencing, the lengths, the keys and the recording decisions would all be different if the argument were different. On that test the genre has produced perhaps a dozen, and they are the most ambitious objects it owns.
What has to happen before the name is earned
Three things separate a record built like a building from a shelf of songs with a shared cover. The order has to be load bearing, so that playing track six before track two damages something. The music has to change in response to the text rather than accompanying it, which is where nearly every attempt fails. And the concept has to be doing work that could not have been done in a single song, otherwise it is a good song padded out to forty minutes. Anybody who wants the wider argument about the canon should start from the chapter this belongs to, because most of what follows sits outside it deliberately.
Bathory turned a theme into a form
The Swede working alone in a converted garage did it first and did it before anybody in Norway had recorded a note. Bathory recorded Hammerheart at Heavenshore Studio between June and August 1989, Noise Records released it on 23 April 1990, and its eight tracks and fifty five minutes were all written by Quorthon around a single argument about the end of the Norse religion and the arrival of the church. Tempos slow to a march. Choirs replace the shriek. One song, "Valhalla", survives from an abandoned double album that would have set Viking metal against speed metal on separate discs. The record is the second panel of a triptych that runs from Blood Fire Death in 1988 to Twilight of the Gods in 1991, and it is the first time in this music that a story dictated the tempo rather than the other way round.
What Quorthon understood, and what most of his imitators did not, is that a concept costs something. He gave up the speed that had made his name, gave up the blasphemy that had been his subject, and gave up a substantial part of his audience in the process. That is the price of the form, and a record that pays no price is not carrying a concept, it is carrying a poster.
Ulver set Blake to music and then left
The Norwegians who had already made three albums in three unrelated styles then made the most literal concept record in the genre's history and used it as an exit. Ulver released Themes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell through Jester Records on 17 December 1998, two discs running forty eight and fifty two minutes, every lyric lifted from Blake and every track title taken from the poem's plate numbering, with Kristoffer Rygg producing alongside Tore Ylwizaker and guest voices from Ihsahn, Samoth and Fenriz. There is electronics on it, industrial percussion, progressive rock and long ambient stretches, and there is very little that anybody would file as black metal. It alienated a large part of the audience the band had built and it opened the door to a far larger one, which was almost certainly the point.
A record that pays no price is not carrying a concept. It is carrying a poster.
The French cycle, and the only theology in the genre worth the name
The anonymous French collective who have never confirmed a single member's identity built the most sustained argument black metal has attempted. Deathspell Omega released three albums between 2004 and 2010 as one continuous work: Si monvmentvm reqvires, circvmspice in 2004, Fas - Ite, Maledicti, in Ignem Aeternum in 2007 and Paracletus in 2010, each taking a different position on the same question about the relation between God and Satan, and each written so that the chords refuse to resolve until the argument does. No website, no photographs, no concerts, no credits in the booklets. The band left nothing to look at except the records, which is a consecration of sorts, and it forced a generation of listeners to argue about the music instead of about the people.
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.
John Milton, Paradise Lost
The trilogy also settles a long standing complaint about the genre, which is that its blasphemy is decorative. These three records are built on an actual reading, they take positions that a theologian would recognise as positions, and the difficulty of the music is not an affectation but the direct consequence of trying to write down something that resists being written down. Whether that is enjoyable is a separate question and the honest answer is that it frequently is not. The much shorter route into the same argument, made with three chords and no theology at all, is under a Funeral Moon.
Narrative, and the two ways it fails
Cradle of Filth made the genre's most commercially successful concept album and demonstrated both failure modes at once. Cruelty and the Beast came out on 5 May 1998 through Music for Nations, reached number forty eight on the British album chart, and told the story of Elizabeth Báthory with the actress Ingrid Pitt narrating, reprising a part she had played in a Hammer film in 1971. The idea is sound and the casting is inspired. The execution buried it: the mix was so poor that Sarah Jezebel Deva said afterwards that most of the vocals she had spent twenty five hours recording could not be heard, and the band went back to it twenty one years later and remixed the whole thing. A story told through a mix nobody can follow is not a story.
Emperor demonstrated the other failure, which is the more interesting one. Prometheus: The Discipline of Fire & Demise was recorded across 2000 and 2001 at Symphonique Studios and Akkerhaugen Lydstudio, Candlelight released it on 21 October 2001, and Ihsahn wrote every note of it, played most of them and produced the result. Kerrang! gave it five stars. It is the most complex thing the band ever made and it is also the point at which a band stopped being a band, since one man writing a birth to death cycle by himself has no reason to keep three other names on the sleeve. Emperor did not make another album.
The unlikeliest one is the best of them
The American who put a banjo into black metal made the concept album the genre had no idea it wanted. Panopticon is Austin Lunn alone, and Kentucky was released in June 2012 through Pagan Flames and Handmade Birds, fifty one minutes in which original compositions sit beside three genuine protest songs out of the Appalachian coalfields: Sarah Ogan Gunning's "Come All Ye Coal Miners", Florence Reece's "Which Side Are You On?" and Jean Ritchie's "Black Waters". Colin Marston mixed it. Johan Becker played violin on it. The subject is strip mining and the men who fought over it, and the record moves between bluegrass and tremolo picking without treating either as a novelty.
It works because the concept is load bearing in the strictest sense. Take the folk songs out and the metal tracks lose their argument; take the metal out and the folk songs become a compilation. That is the test stated at the top of this piece, passed by the least likely record in the genre, and it is the reason a concept album is worth attempting at all despite the wreckage of the ones that failed. The shorter form, where an entire argument has to survive inside five minutes, is the Best Black Metal Songs.
