Xasthur
The Funeral of Being

Forgive me, long-time admirers of the good Malefic, if I dare, having made his acquaintance only recently, to review this album, undoubtedly a cornerstone of recent black metal history.

I do not know how Malefic worked before and after this "The Funeral of Being," nor am I able to draw a comparison between him and the other luminaries of the genre, of which my knowledge is, all things considered, approximate. What I feel I can say is that this work, perhaps surpassed by works of others or other works of Xasthur himself, even if taken in isolation, even if examined without considering the context, has its own raison d'être.

"The Funeral of Being" has its own raison d'être: a reason that transcends black metal, the metal universe itself.

I abandoned black metal at the end of the nineties, perplexed by the stylistic choices in vogue at the time, choices that led to the progressive diluting of the spirit that had animated the genre in the first half of the decade (some embraced the fantastic world of vampires; some regressed to the atrocities of the ancient fathers Venom, Bathory, and Celtic Frost, not to mention those who went back to the Motorhead; some, wholeheartedly or not, left the genre entirely). Thus, I abandoned black metal like wise rats abandon a ship at the first signs of structural failure, but I left it with the good taste in my mouth of works like "Nattens Madrigal" and "Filosofem," two works that, seen with today’s eyes, have a clear symbolic value.

On one side, Ulver, inspired by what Darkthrone's unbeatable "Transilvanian Hunger" had said years before, showed that a certain standard of black metal had reached its final saturation. I am talking about that archetypal black metal that embodied its purest and uncontaminated form by striving for the absolute (the speed that dematerializes the physicality of aggression, the melodic synthesis taken to the extreme, the confused and crackling sounds that reduce everything to an imperceptible buzz). On the other side, the last electric tome written by Burzum (that "Filosofem," which, in my opinion, is one of the most significant albums of the '90s) represented the possibility of overcoming that paradigm, perpetuating the departure from the material world not through a flight to the stars, but through introversion, by taking a desperate dive into the abyss of one's own (un)consciousness.

The black metal that the good Grishnackh proposed at the time was a true act of individualism (not even too consciously, if truth be told), an imploded black metal, so personal, driven in-depth to the point of renouncing the cardinal principles that uphold metal itself: speed was diluted in the cadenced step of a desolate drum machine (after all, what’s the point in exhausting oneself on the drums!); the surgical, rocky, powerful riffs sank in the inconclusive crackling of impalpable and muddled notes; the shout of hatred and blasphemy softened into a subdued croak that seemed to come from the darkest recesses of the soul. An ethereal dimension, if you want spiritual, yet eerily monumental, seemed to dislodge the physicality of a pragmatic, concrete, practical genre like metal. Grishnackh, gossip aside, showed he knew how to transcend the genre, and his deconstructive work is comparable, in some ways, to the overcoming of classic extreme metal stylings carried out, from far other premises, through the sonic collapse of those bands today identified under the post-hardcore banner. A bit like what Slint did for (or against) rock.

"Filosofem," as history has shown, turned out to be something authentically post, in form and substance, beyond all labels and all adoptable classification criteria. The music contained therein is pure emotional matter, a sound flow that at the time seemed to constitute, in particular, the maximum expression of an emotional disintegration in its terminal state, and, in general, the ultimate terminus of an entire musical trend that we can define, more broadly and without blinders, as music of discomfort: a tradition as old as man, which, in recent history, starts from the urban neuroses of the Velvet Underground, reaches our days, embodying itself from time to time in ever different and emotionally disconcerting forms, from the jackhammers of Einsturzende Neubauten to the industrial detonations of Swans. And so on.

It was delightful, from my point of view, to look again at today's black metal panorama and discover that in the third millennium, the Burzumian doctrine has been embraced, metabolized, and so well reinterpreted by the new generations. The exception, the flair has become rule and form, and among all the disciples, from Shining to Silencer, passing by the more recent Leviathan and Nortt (more tilted toward funeral doom, to be honest), Xasthur is, to my mind, the most vivid and sincere image of this movement christened by insiders with the label depressive black metal.

An ambiguous label yet still a label. It’s the substance that counts. Because when I listen to "The Funeral of Being," I close my eyes and find myself in dark corridors, with impalpable walls, stained with blood and tar, cutting the breath from the dust and cobwebs and the heaviness of being (much to the delight of Emil Kundera). Corridors of the mind, corridors of the soul, images taking shape through the echoes and reverberations of the tremulous and dissonant notes of a guitar so rotten it liquefies and turns into mush, an insane and muddy psychedelia with strong existential undertones capable of ferrying the unconscious to unknown and dangerous shores, a session of involuntary hypnosis aimed at evoking the worst rot encysted in our lungs and soul.

A slimy and foul-smelling limb that embraces us and leads elsewhere, into dark and hopeless rooms, dotted with filthy pools and dripping stalactites that engage in a macabre ballet of (negative) feelings.

Malefic’s scream is the torment of a crow depleted of hope that, consumed by flames, throws itself into the mire to extinguish them. And if the image seems silly to you, I can’t find better words to evoke the sensation of an unbearable, filthy fire burning inside, beyond and above a thick layer of mud that imprisons and clips the wings, hinders in movements, stops, and circumscribes the last glimmer of life and hope destined to extinguish in the dark and in nothingness. Walls of the mind, walls of the soul.

The step Xasthur takes, a little black dwarf on the shoulders of the giant and warty Burzum, is to deconstruct further the debris that "Filosofem" had left behind: the song form does not reside here, evidently, and "The Funeral of Being" is not even to be considered a canonical album but a scribble, heavy expressionist brushstrokes transposed into music, a 48-minute metaphysical slap disjointed into psychic settings, decadent arpeggios, lazy and furious riffs, harrowing screams fading into a unicum aimed at producing sensations of disorientation besides discomfort.

The recording quality varies from track to track (the album gathers recordings made at different times between September 2001 and April 2003), yet how fundamental do the rash choices made in mixing sound to us, these unbalanced and poorly equalized sounds that erect a blurred cathedral of overlapping harmonies, mixtures of guitar and keyboards and decay-laden cymbals that march inconclusively toward nothing. Malefic's filtered voice comes and goes, at times imperceptible, at times exploding, but always fundamental and simultaneously useless, while the tracks dramatically deviate from a rational structure: psychedelia running at a thousand miles per hour only to collapse into twists that move tortuously according to entropic laws that turn toward a horizon of decadence, desolation, destruction. And nothing more.

Tense moments accumulate in voids, absences, disturbingly static states, or formidable descents, hypnotic electro-acoustic falls, that almost make you want to coin a new genre: the regressive. And even the way the pieces follow one another seems to have no complete sense: the very choice to open with a 7-minute instrumental track (the intense "The Awakening to the Unknown Perception of Evil," one of those starts I hadn’t heard in a while, where riffs as cold as the proverbial January dung merge with layers of synth and Yeti’s farting!) seems rather unusual.

Brief intros are scattered haphazardly throughout the album, like frozen turds floating in the polar sea, splotches of asphyxiated piano here, diarrhea of restless organ phrasing avidly copulating with echoes of BC-era guitar chimes.

And then the two parts of "Blood from the Roots of the Forest," where the second act precedes the first (but why, then?): I’m not saying there's genius in all of this, on the contrary, maybe it's all the fruit of superficiality, approximation, or simple careless sloppiness, yet for the pragmatic world of metal, often victim to rigid schematics, this irrationality, perceivable in both form and substance, is truly a good thing, since the first (the form) is functional to the second (the substance).

The primitive and tortuous plots of this derelict post-metal contribute to generating a labyrinthine dimension (the corridors of the soul, dirty with blood and tar), suffocating (the dust, the cobwebs), inconclusive (the stumbling step of a blind man, dismounted by reason, who strugglers, scraping the walls, crawling the icy ancient pavement of a narrow and limitless place, hoping that time—if time dictates its tyranny in these places—wears him out and corrodes him in a slow decay).

And don't be fooled into thinking the work shines solely for its deconstructive intents: the songwriting, in fact, always seems deeply inspired and aimed at communicating, transmitting sensations. At this point, I feel I should quote Amedeo Minghi's words, who, in an interview years ago, explained how all beautiful songs are necessarily Neapolitan; how, to understand if a song is truly beautiful, it must be sung in Neapolitan (and to prove his thesis, he sang, with piano in hand, "Another Brick in the Wall - Part II" by Pink Floyd in Neapolitan, in one of the most horrifying scenes I have had to witness during my miserable existence). And if I tell you this, it is because you have to take "Reflecting Hateful Energy" and sing it in Neapolitan, and you'll be amazed at how the Neapolitan idiom will gift to the track’s tragic evolutions. This is to say that the existential sketches born from Malefic's muddy soul, singer of human afflictions, are truly beautiful, poetic at times, shocking for the capacity of emotional penetration.

"The Funeral of Being," in conclusion, is not just a black metal album, nor simply metal, but a cantautorato work: a man-artist and an instrument in hand, together to give voice to sentiments.

As for me, when I plunge into "The Funeral of Being," I stop existing and flow into something broader… so broad as to resemble the Nothing.

Don't worry, be depressive!