Hailing from that legendary hotbed of heavy metal Ulaan Baataar, Mongolia, Ornaments of Agony is a funeral doom band (meaning that if you enjoy listening to it, they have failed and you are entitled to your money back).
Funeral doom is not a genre that lends itself to mutation and experiment. There is only one way to do this sound, and Ornaments of Agony sound much like Wormphlegm and Ahab and all the rest. A distant, reverb-saturated guitar assault rips at your ears, like buzzsaws from a kilometer away. A vocalist croaks and groans miserably, his voice distorted and Daleked beyond recognition. Pianos play ugly, chromatic melodies. Pianos seem a fixture in funeral doom, I suppose because an ear bored of guitar dissonance can be shocked anew by awful noises made on a piano. In D&D terms, the guitars are chaotic evil, while the pianos are lawful evil.
“Heregsuur” emerges from a null hypothesis of fuzzy industrial noise. The song initially sounds like a relaxing Pelican song before becoming nasty and brutal. “Huiten amisgal” is really too fast for funeral doom, and is more vocally-driven than the others, but the general template of dissonance remains.
The performance is (deliberately?) sloppy, with different tones and timbres just coming and going, none of them really in time or having much to do with each other. The old joke goes: three men in the third world are in prison, and they ask each other why. The first says ‘I was always 5 minutes late for work, so I was accused of sabotage’ The second says ‘I was always 5 minutes early for work, so I was accused of espionage’ But the third says ‘I was always on time for work, so I was accused of having a Western watch’. That could also describe the tracking and recording of this album.
“Tumen jargal, arvin zovlon” finishes the album much as it starts – that’s my one complaint, it’s that the album is too unvarying in its approach. Maybe the band members thought that the album should be constructed like a battleship – solid gray steel from top to bottom, with no point of weakness. But Sun O)))’s “Alice” shows that slow metal songs don’t have to be like that. You can finish different to how you started, without compromising a track or album’s intensity and bleakness.
Like all extreme metal, Ornaments of Agony abandons songwriting and merely tries to be an unforgettable experience. One band of this style sounds the same as the next, and I have no idea if this band’s one member is intentionally sloppy or just sucks at playing. But the goal is achieved, nevertheless. Genghis Khan would execute enemies by pouring liquid metal down their throats, and Ornaments of Agony continues his tradition in sonic form.
Do I want to see the future? No. The future is boring. What I want to see is the past.
The future is separated from us by a few sunrises and sunsets. The past is locked away forever. If you want to know what will happen in anno domini 3014, the solution is relatively easy: live a thousand more years. But we’ll never know for sure what happened in 1014, unless it’s documented in some way through art or writing (which themselves are unreliable). In theory, we could use computers to recursively calculate past events, but even that approach is better suited to the future than the past. It’s easier for a computer to take some causes and calculate the end state than to take an end state and calculate the causes.
What’s particularly interesting is musical history. Who was the first guitarist to use distortion? Who was the first drummer to use a matched grip? Many of these questions have no answers. People who make history often don’t realise they’re making history, and many things from music’s past are unrecorded and undocumented.
In Cauda Semper Stat Venenum is an Italian progressive rock album, allegedly from 1969. If this is true, then Jacula was more groundbreaking than a nose-diving 747 packed with shovels. The levels of distortion and heaviness rival anything Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, or Deep Purple could boast at the time, and the songwriting is dissonant, challenging, and very dark. If it could be proven that this is from 1969, you could definitely say that Jacula were the true forefathers of doom metal.
But maybe it’s not from 1969. The guitar distortion has a very processed and modern character, quite unlike the rawness of Link Wray’s early sound, or the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter”. There’s fairly technical guitar shredding that also doesn’t jibe well with a 1969 release date. Nobody can find any reference to this album in contemporary Italian music magazines. There are rumours that In Cauda Semper Stat Venenum was recorded much later, and given a ludicrous back-date to enhance its street cred.
Sadly, lies about release dates are common in metal. French hack Luc Mertz (who records as Zarach “Baal” Tharagh) claims he was playing black metal in 1983, before even the first Metallica album. Black metal musician Kanwulf claims to have released a demo in 1989, which seems unlikely given that the name “Kanwulf” comes from a TV series that aired in 1995, and this name is prominently stamped on the cover of his demo. Everyone wants to be the first to the party.
How well does this album stand up, if we give it a later release date? Not too well. The songwriting is bleak but tedious. Its symphonic themes are fairly complex but tonally the same, and this bores the ear. The guitars are just “there” – there’s no riffs driving the music, the way Tony Iommi would have it. The album’s one interesting moment is “Triumphatus sad”, where guitar solos and hammond keyboards duel back and forth in an interesting manner. Otherwise, the album is a monotonous backdrop of sound. ONE sound.
Does In Cauda Semper Stat Venenum have value? That depends on the release date. If it’s from 1969, it’s an important part of musical history. If it’s from the 90s, it’s worthless and forgettable. And nobody knows when it’s from, so I guess it’s like they used to say: You pays your money and you takes your choice.
Or did they? I don’t know. That’s from the past too.
80% of heavy metal is played by after-hours Burger King workers with lyrics that are about killing people and worshiping the devil. It’s not exactly high-class entertainment, and you’d think more metal fans would have a sense of humor. However, they tend to be insecure crybabies, and this album illuminated that fact with an atom bomb blast.
Iron Fire is a power metal band that arrived in 2000 with Thunderstorm, a Hammerfall ripoff that possessed energy and passion (things the actual Hammerfall has not had in years) but little creativity. Their second album, On the Edge, was frontman Martin Steene’s effort at fixing that by adding Motley Crue vocals, progressive song structures, and various other things. The results were dismal sales, countless lost fans, and the termination of a record deal.
The band is too obscure for the album to be a notorious flop, but a listen reveals a sadly overlooked and misunderstood album that could have been the cure for power metal’s current diseases. I would rather hear this sort of thing than the new Edguy, Helloween, or Sonata Arctica albums – “experimental” though it is. Derided and maligned, this album is the power metal Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (but as Neil Degrasse Tyson pointed out, if Rudolph’s nose is shiny then it’s probably just reflecting light, not emitting it – useless for navigating fog.)
If you don’t want to listen to the whole thing, stay with the program just for tracks 1-7. The band is just on fire in these six songs and one prelude, with huge hooks, addictive melodies, and Tommy Hansen’s superb production – each of “The End of it All’s” kick drum hits strikes your ear like a spitball of perfectly compressed air. “Into the Abyss” lurches from downtempo sludge to uptempo thrashing like a Panzer tank changing gears, and “On the Edge” brings lots of agitation and vocal histrionics, accentuated by some death metal vocals.
But the greatest song of all is “Thunderspirit”, an amazing shockwave of high-speed energy driven by Morten Plenge’s lightning-fast drumming and maybe Martin Steene’s best vocal performance ever. The cannon-fire in the bridge was a nice touch.
Two songs are total bombs. “Wanted Man”…Stop it with this cat crap, Steene. The only place where you’re a wanted man is in the local gay bar for the 345345987 male escorts you forgot to pay. “The Price of Blood” is not as irritating but instead is far more boring – nothing to grab on to here except dry rock riffs and some goofy vocal effects.
But out of all the Iron Fire releases, this is the one that interests me the most. It’s unified, it’s catchy, it has an impressively low number of filler songs, and it’s not overly muddy or dark-sounding like their newer efforts. Definitely underrated, and worth seeking out. Heavy metal can suck, but you don’t have to.
