Empiricism is the record on which Borknagar took the cathedral of Norwegian black metal, tore off its roof and converted it into an observatory, and the conversion holds almost everywhere. Walking into Fagerborg Studio in June 2001 with a new singer, a new bassist and nine of its ten pieces written the year before, the sextet assembled by guitarist Øystein G. Brun came out that summer with an album that trades the pyre for a telescope and loses remarkably little of the heat in the exchange. Century Media released it in Europe on 22 October 2001. It has not rusted since.
Fifth album, and two new men in the garrison. Vintersorg replaced ICS Vortex at the microphone and took on clean vocals, harsh vocals and the choirs; Tyr arrived with a fretless six-string bass. Around them stood Brun and Jens F. Ryland on guitars, Lars A. Nedland on synth, Hammond and grand piano, and Asgeir Mickelson behind the kit, a line-up that would not survive the next record intact, since this was Ryland's last Borknagar album until 2010. Engineered, mixed and co-produced by Børge Finstad alongside the band, with extra sessions at TopRoom Studio in Lunner and mastering by Ola Johansen at Masterhuset in Oslo that August, the record was built by a crew that knew exactly which stones it meant to move.
Empiricism means something like basing the knowledge on the use of the five senses.
Øystein G. Brun, Metal Message, 8 October 2001
The title is the programme, and the instruments obey it. Where the earlier records marched under the banners of epic black metal, this one drags a Hammond organ and a grand piano up the nave like siege engines and sets them to preach, tilting the whole edifice towards a progressive, openly retro heaviness that owes as much to the seventies as to any frostbitten tape from the second wave. The organ blows out the stained glass and lets the starlight in. Finstad's production is clear and layered, every voice in the arrangement standing in its own light, so the density never turns to fog. The harsh voice is still there. It no longer runs the house.
The singer is the pivot of the whole record, and the pairing of his clean and harsh voices is the selling point of everything here. It is also where the album divides a room. "The Genuine Pulse" opens the record and is the first place to hear the argument: one ear keeps listening for the absent Vortex, the other hears the new man sitting too far back in the mix. The second ear deserves more trust than the first. The voice is the best instrument on the album, and on the opener it is left fighting the arrangement for air.
"Matter & Motion" is the mould breaker, and its story belongs on the sleeve. A brooding piano instrumental that gathers mass as the drums and then the guitar come in, it is the one piece on the album whose music Brun did not write, and it is the passage the record would least survive without. Nedland built a staircase out of piano keys, and the band climbed it in boots.
The heavy lifting happens in the second act. "Soul Sphere" and "The Stellar Dome" stand like two buttresses holding the converted cathedral upright, and they are where the album earns its number, with "The Stellar Dome" giving Vintersorg the finest singing he does anywhere on the disc. Between them sits "Inherit the Earth", the song the band chose to put a face on, a montage cut from live footage shot after the album came out, the new material already hauled out of the studio and onto a stage.
What holds it back is the very discipline that made it. Written inside a single year and recorded in what Brun described to Metal Message on 8 October 2001 as six to seven effective weeks of studio time, the album keeps one temperature from the first track to the last, and by the time "Four Element Synchronicity" arrives, carrying the only lyric Vintersorg wrote for the record, consistency has begun to sound like sameness. Nothing here falls below the line, and very little vaults over it. The record gambles on its new sound once, wins, and then declines to gamble again.
Nothing here falls below the line, and very little vaults over it.
That is a limit, not a wound. "Liberated" and "The View of Everlast" close the album on the same steady flame, and a listener who wanted the old blizzard back will not find it in them. Everyone else will find a band that changed its singer, its bassist and its centre of gravity in a single year and lost none of its nerve in the process.
This is the record for anyone who keeps a Hammond album and a second-wave tape on the same shelf and has wondered what a marriage between them would sound like, and for anyone who thinks the bloodline of Norwegian black metal ended when the frost melted. Start with "Matter & Motion" and "The Stellar Dome", then go back to "The Genuine Pulse" and decide for yourself where the singer belongs in the mix. Skip it, and you miss the clearest map of what happened when part of that scene put down the torch and picked up the telescope.