"With this album we wanted to mistreat black metal, to make our music suffer." That is Vindsval, guitarist, singer and chief architect of Blut aus Nord, speaking to Metalorgie in an interview conducted by email in November 2006, translated here from his French, and few musicians have ever described their own record so exactly. MoRT does not play black metal. It bolts the genre into a steel frame, snaps its ribs and keeps the lungs pumping by machine.
Issued by Candlelight on 23 October 2006, three years after The Work Which Transforms God and hard on the heels of the 2005 EP Thematic Emanation of Archetypal Multiplicity, recorded over several months in the band's own studio by Vindsval on guitars and vocals, W.D. Feld on drums and keyboards and GhÖst on bass, with no outside hand allowed near the desk, the fifth full-length from the French trio that guards its anonymity runs forty-seven minutes and refuses its eight pieces a single name. They run from "Chapter I" to "Chapter VIII". Numbers, not titles.
It was not always going to be that bare. In April 2006 the album was announced with seven titled songs, and the long name that still clings to it, Metamorphosis of Realistic Theories, was in Vindsval's own account a working title the label let slip; the record, he added, could have been a double album. The intent was narrower than the rumour. In that same November interview he said the band wanted to see one side of The Work Which Transforms God through to its end, that crawling music, to dig into the micro-intervals begun on a few earlier pieces, and be done with it. An exorcism, then. Not a sequel.
Picture an iron lung: a sealed steel drum that hauls air in and out of a paralysed body on a fixed count, whether the body inside has anything left to say or not. That is the engine of this record, and Vindsval named the mechanism himself. The hardest part, he told Metalorgie, was giving the album rhythm without giving it life. So the percussion pumps at mid-tempo, linear and cold, refusing every blast beat, a bellows working beneath the guitars on a schedule nobody in the room set. Rhythm without life is the whole programme, and the record keeps to it with a discipline that never once blinks.
Rhythm without life is the whole programme, and the record keeps to it with a discipline that never once blinks.
Above that pulse, the guitars commit the real desecration. Stacked in layers of dissonance where riffs used to stand, grinding the second wave's tremolo picking down to filings and leaving almost nothing a guitarist could teach another guitarist, they bend and slide off pitch, note smearing into note like rime spreading across a ward window at night, so that no chord ever quite lands where the ear expects it. The vocals are buried under all of it, processed into growls, whispers and murmured chants that drift up as if from a bed further down the corridor. Nothing is shouted at you. Everything is administered.
"Chapter I" opens the ward and writes its rules. Within its six minutes the pulse is fixed, the guitars are already crawling sideways through their micro-intervals, and every chapter that follows speaks the grammar it lays down. Between the pieces, short ambient passages of bells, distant screams and low distorted voices stitch the eight chapters into one continuous patient, which is why MoRT works as a single forty-seven-minute act and falls apart as a playlist. Take a chapter out and it bleeds.
"Chapter V" is where the machine, for once, lets the patient draw breath on his own. In its middle sits a mournful clean vocal passage, the warmest stretch on the whole record, and at six minutes and thirty-five seconds it is the chapter that shows most plainly what the method costs: one human sound in that ashen ward lands with the force of a scream, simply because nothing else has been allowed to sound human for the better part of twenty-five minutes. Then the bellows resume. "Chapter VIII", the longest at seven minutes and nineteen seconds, is reached through the same murky connective tissue as everything before it and closes the treatment as the last full turn of the pump before the power is cut.
The narrow palette is the charge this album will always have to answer, and it is a fair one. Eight shades of black, or one shade eight times over: that is the argument this record starts and never settles. The side worth taking is the first, because the sameness is the design and the design holds for forty-seven minutes. But the numbered titles strip away every signpost, and the stretch between the opener and "Chapter V" offers nothing to hold on to except the method itself; a listener who arrives without patience will be gone long before the clean voice comes. The real limit is in that clean voice. "Chapter V" proves how much a single contrast buys on this record, and MoRT allows itself barely one. A second would have cost the iconoclasm nothing.
This is for the listener who wants black metal taken apart on the table rather than reverently restaged, and who will sit through forty-seven minutes of deliberate suffocation to see what the genre looks like with its pulse handed to a machine. Whoever needs riffs to hum on the way home should keep walking; there are none, by order of the men who made it. Everyone else should hear the one record on which Blut aus Nord stopped the heart of black metal on purpose, and kept the lungs going anyway.