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Rating: With Tsunami, you can trust that, given the high-quality books it publishes every year, this time it brings us the first of three volumes dedicated to black metal.
The three volumes of the Black Metal Compendium are divided by geographic areas. The first volume is dedicated, as it should be, to exploring Scandinavia and the Nordic lands, where the genre was born, while the next two volumes will focus on Europe and on the United States and the rest of the world.
At this point, you might ask yourself: “Why pick up yet another book on black metal?” The answer is simple: firstly, because it’s truly well-written, and secondly, because it offers a new approach to the subject.
This is not, in fact, the usual black metal history, often more about criminal events, nor the typical “The 100 best albums…”, even though the heart of the book is undoubtedly the reviews. The authors aim to tell the story of black metal by focusing primarily on the most important part of this movement, namely the music, along with the whole concept of misanthropy, hatred, ferocity, anger, disdain, and rebellion it carries. To achieve this, the authors start from the albums, not necessarily the best but the most representative, and through them, they reconstruct the history of black metal.
Do not make the mistake of reading the individual album entries – perhaps jumping from one to another looking for the ones you love, to see if the authors agree with you, or the ones you don’t know or have just heard of – which is quite common in this type of book. Not that this type of reading isn’t enjoyable – as mentioned, the book is well-written, and the entries are rich in details, both technical about the album and the songs, and contextual where the album emerged – but this approach to reading will make you miss something. The best way to fully enjoy the Black Metal Compendium is to approach it like a novel, from start to end, and in doing so, you will discover how the reading flows smoothly between reviews and how the album entries are just a “pretext” to tell a story.
The book is divided into seven chapters, with the first dedicated to the beginnings, focusing on those bands that, in Norway, founded black metal starting in 1992, the year “A Blaze In The Northern Sky” by Darkthrone was released, chosen as the first fully and authentically black metal publication as we consider it today.
The second explores how, following the closure of the Helvete record store (where it all began) and the death of Euronymous, black metal did not implode but increasingly spread thanks to the bands that generated it, while also welcoming new younger bands that decided to take up the torch of the black flame, eventually evolving the genre into something new and different, yet continuously evolving without altering the initial concept.
The narrative, in the third and fourth chapters, moves away from Norway to explore nearby territories where other bands started playing this genre, with an approach that was at least partly personal and different from the “true Norwegian black metal”, leading us to Finland and Sweden. The fifth chapter deals with a different approach to this music, shedding (black) light on the so-called “symphonic black metal”, whereas the sixth deals with the various branches black metal has taken over the years, from dungeon synth to viking, and to depressive black metal. There is then a final chapter, dedicated to the masters, those bands and albums which, while not yet definable as black metal, if only because not only did the genre but even the concept of black metal itself not yet exist, contributed to influencing the bands that would soon create the genre.
The authors of the volumes are two Italian writers, Lorenzo Ottolenghi and Simone Vavalà, passionate about the genre from the beginning and editors for Metalitalia, who write extremely well and with passion, demonstrating vast knowledge, not just about black metal in particular or metal in general but in a 360-degree view, which is apparent from reading just a few pages of the book. The book manages to interest both the neophyte by taking nothing for granted and the more experienced enthusiast by delving deeply into the narratives of the albums, but above all, it is a truly compelling read.
It’s pointless to mention the albums discussed in the volume; surely all the main bands are included, alongside several lesser-known bands, because, as you have understood, the book’s intent is not to provide a simple collection of didactic reviews but to tell a story, the story of black metal!
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