Goatmoon
Stella Polaris

Jaakko Lähde, aka Blackgoat Gravedesecrator. Anyone familiar with the name of his project and who read it in the title above is likely already preparing a barrage of insults at him and at me for writing this, when Debaser realizes what this Finnish rogue sings about, it will probably place a warning at the beginning saying the staff dissociates from the provocations (often indeed vile and absurd) that the aforementioned musician enacts in his interpretation of Black Metal. If my predictions are correct, NSBM is slowly moving towards the mainstream of sonic extremity, if I'm wrong, it might mean that the sacrilegious and blasphemous power of this branch is losing its impact... In this subgenre, often populated by operetta characters, the component of provocation at any cost is increasingly evident, new generations compete to grab the latest album (often coming from countries of the former Soviet bloc) with the Black Sun or the Totenkopf on the cover, regardless of the strictly musical content. Initially, in my opinion, this deviant branch of BM emerged precisely as the last "disturbing" bastion against a genre that was now signing contracts with international majors and selling tight t-shirts for groupies with corpse paint, a "flame" that seemed no longer to vomit in the face of a society it wanted to liquidate with hands and teeth, as well as with just guitars and demonic screams. Also because it is known that in extreme music (even at the dawn of the genre, from Slayer to today), you can sing about everything: rapes of all kinds, torture, sexual perversions, inciting or encouraging murders, suicides, human sacrifices, and other amenities, Lucifer is now relegated to a romantic-decaying character role, closer to Milton's "Paradise Lost" than to the film The Exorcist; only one topic today excludes you from the market, stirs up the talk shows of mainstream TV in prime time, blocks your distributors, distribution, and therefore, indirectly gives you visibility: Nazism, with all its baggage of symbols, faces, ideas, slogans. Forgive all this hodgepodge but I immediately get to Goatmoon, a Finnish one-man band that occupied the pages of national newspapers (even Gad Lerner intervened...) also in our Bel Paese last January, when they came to play in the province of Pordenone, along with other groups of the same ilk, nothing so striking, if it weren't for the fact that it was January 27, a well-known day on the calendar for reasons we all know. Provocation within provocation or macabre coincidence? Everyone has their own view of the thing and with this necessary premise, I now try to move on to the topic that interests me, that is, the musical one, even if I could not completely ignore the ideological one in cases like this.

Stella Polaris comes after years of demos and various splits with other groups in the same musical and political area not only in northern Europe, and it is the fifth official studio album. The style is that of the fusion between Finnish folk music and old-school BM but in this case, our Blackgoat proves to be not just one of the many characters seeking attention and not worth a damn, quite the contrary, Goatmoon is a high-quality project and just listening to an album gem like "Voitto tai Valhalla" (from 2014) is enough to understand that we are dealing with an artist of absolute value. The intro is hypnotic and after just a few seconds you immediately enter a Finland that shifts from rural and archaic to furious and icy, the rhythm of the piece that opens and gives the album its name is engaging and never trivial, Lähde manages to create a series of sounds alternating between tempo and voice changes that bring us back to the previous album in terms of epicness and driving force. How one could never sound banal in an oversaturated genre like this remains a mystery, yet I adore this album, I love how Goatmoon manages to blend folk and BM without falling into the already-heard or boring for even a second, this, in my modest opinion, certainly makes it a cut above many of its peers artistically born in the new millennium; hear the flutes as they enter a piece like "Rock The Nations," for example, or the tragic melancholy that becomes pure epic in "Sonderkommando Nord" and I won't add more. All in all, I even see some insane parody in all this attitude, from the nickname Lähde chose to how he dresses in official photos, from the stereotypical name of the group to the last track of this album, namely "P.I.L.A.," a pure and simple ballad, with singing that strange is to say the least and that leaves room for interpretation on whether he is parodying folk-metal, as did that nutcase Nattefrost in "Terrorist"...

All of this considered, I wanted to simply say that even here, since it's about music and Black Metal is present in all its forms, a voice about this Finnish musical project is missing. Surely its founder and sole composer is insane, foolish, absurd to the extreme, but the fact remains that he knows how to do his job terribly well and that each album does not disappoint expectations. I understand that for many it is difficult if not impossible to separate the artist from the work and here it is more than understandable, however, for those who are fundamentally interested in the musical discourse and love BM, as well as its mixing with the folk music of northeastern Europe, here they will find another polar star.