In 1990 a band from Vancouver put out an album on Wild Rags, a small shop and label operating out of Los Angeles, and the record was so far past what the equipment could carry that a listener still cannot reliably tell where one riff ends and the next begins. That was the point. Fallen Angel of Doom is the founding document of an entire method, and thirty five years later nobody has made a more extreme one.
Sixteen years after it, four thousand kilometres east, a different band released a debut called Métal Noir Québécois that is melodic, patient, sung in French and concerned with the history of one province. Both are Canadian black metal. They have almost nothing else in common, and the distance between them is the only honest way to describe the country.
Ross Bay, and the invention of war metal
Assembled in Vancouver in 1984 and working under three other names before settling on the one that stuck in 1987, Blasphemy arrived at a method that had no precedent and has needed almost no revision since: everything at maximum, the guitars saturated past the point where a riff is recoverable, the drums somewhere inside the collapse rather than under it, and the whole thing arriving as one sustained rout rather than as a sequence of songs. Fallen Angel of Doom came in 1990 on Wild Rags, Gods of War followed through Osmose Productions in 1993, the band stopped in 1994 and came back in 1999, and the two records between them founded what is now called war metal or bestial black metal. The scene took its name from a cemetery in Victoria and has kept it ever since.
This is the strain of black metal least interested in atmosphere, melody, nature, theology or anything else the genre has argued about elsewhere. It is a war party rather than a liturgy. What it is interested in is force, and it pursues force by removing every element that would let a listener orient themselves inside a song, which is a genuine compositional decision even though it is usually described as an accident.
Everything at maximum, and the riff deliberately made unrecoverable. That is not incompetence. It is the entire idea, held for thirty five years without a revision.
The line that runs out of it
The method travelled through a small number of people rather than through a scene. Conqueror formed in British Columbia in 1994 with J. Read on drums and vocals and R. Förster on guitar and bass, released one album, War Cult Supremacy, in 1999, and split the following year. Read then founded Revenge in Edmonton as a direct continuation, and has kept it running for two decades with a discography whose titles are three nouns separated by full stops and whose records are, if anything, harder to listen to than the ones that inspired them. Axis of Advance worked the same territory. So, later and with more death metal in it, did Mitochondrion, Antediluvian, Adversarial and Auroch.
None of these bands is trying to be liked, and the seriousness of that position is what separates the good ones from the many who copied the surface. A record with no recoverable riff has to be structured by something else, and in the strong examples that something is pacing: where the collapse thickens, where it thins, when the drums come forward. In the weak examples there is nothing there at all.
Quebec, which is a different country as far as the records go
The second Canadian tradition has no relationship to the first. It formed in Quebec in the 2000s around Sepulchral Productions, a label that grew out of the band Frozen Shadows, and it took the name Métal Noir Québécois from the December 2006 debut by Forteresse. Everything the western tradition removes, this one keeps: melody, long tremolo lines, folk phrasing, a clean guitar break, an audible bass. The lyrics are in French and the subject is the province, its history, its winters and its long argument about itself. The band described that first record as a homage to old traditions and to everyone waiting for a banner of liberty to be raised, which is a political position stated plainly rather than a coded one.
Sombres Forêts, Gris, Monarque, Sorcier des Glaces, Csejthe and Délétère fill out the roster, most of them on the same label, several of them sharing musicians. It is the closest thing Canada has to an actual scene in the Norwegian sense: a small geography, a label at the centre, a shared subject and a set of people who play on each other's records. It is also the only regional black metal scene anywhere built around a language.
| The western axis | Quebec | |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | Vancouver, 1984 onward | Quebec, 2005 onward |
| Anchor record | Fallen Angel of Doom, 1990 | Métal Noir Québécois, 2006 |
| Label | Wild Rags, Osmose, then self run | Sepulchral Productions |
| Method | Saturation, no recoverable riff | Melody, tremolo lines, folk phrasing |
| Subject | Force, war, blasphemy | History, land, winter, language |
| Descendants | Revenge, Conqueror, Mitochondrion | Sombres Forêts, Gris, Monarque |
Ontario, the prairies and everything else
Woods of Ypres belong to neither tradition and are the best known Canadian band in this territory. Founded in Ontario in 2002 by David Gold, who wrote, sang and played most of it, the project moved from black metal into a slower and more openly depressive form across five records. Gold died on 21 December 2011 in a car crash near Barrie, Ontario. He was 31. Woods 5: Grey Skies and Electric Light was released two months later, and in 2013 it won the Juno award for Metal or Hard Music Album of the Year, which remains the only occasion on which a Canadian national music award has gone to a record of this kind.
The rest is scattered the way everything in this country is scattered. Numenorean in Calgary write long, melodic and open sounding pieces. Panzerfaust in Ontario have built a four part cycle across the 2020s. Thrawsunblat came out of the folk end of the maritime provinces. None of them is near any of the others, and a band in Calgary is further from a band in Quebec than Oslo is from Prague.
Why one country produced both
Because it is not one country in any sense that matters to a rehearsal room. The distance from Vancouver to Quebec is greater than the distance from Bergen to Athens, the two ends do not share a first language, and until very recently a band in one could tour the other only at a cost neither could carry. There was never a national circuit, never a shop everybody stood outside, never a fanzine that covered all of it. What grew instead was three unrelated things that happen to sit inside the same border, which is exactly what happened to black metal in America for the same reasons and on the same scale.
The verdict is straightforward and it goes to the west. Blasphemy did something nobody had done and nobody has improved on, and the Quebec scene, for all that it is more listenable and better made, is working a form that already existed and adding a subject to it. That is a real achievement and a smaller one. Anyone who wants to hear what the same isolation produced at the other end of the planet, with the same postal economy and the same absence of a circuit, should go to australian and New Zealand Black Metal, where the answer arrived at is different again.
