CRUSTCAKE PICKS - NEW CAKE IN THE OVEN: SKAGOS' ÁST

by Van Damned (ATX)

Download: Skagos - "Blossoms Will Sprout from the Carcass" [MP3]

Skagos meant "stone" in the old tongue. The Skagosi named themselves the stoneborn, but their fellow northmen called them Skaggs and liked them little. – George R. R. Martin, A Feast for Crows

The first full-length from British Columbia's Skagos, Ást*, opens with three-and-a-half minutes of hollow, murmuring tape drone – the echoing wind between snow-shrouded evergreens, no doubt. Like the storm-hardened stone clans from Martin's epic fantasy series, Skagos' entire character is a mirror-pond reflection of the ecology that defines it: hemlocks, cedars and firs, granite, slate, moss and lichens, cold, damp mist and endless, torrential rain. The Cascade range, which covers southern British Columbia, the bulk of northern Oregon, the whole of Washington state, and Idaho's panhandle, has proved to be fertile ground for a new, purely-North American strain of black metal, as lush and atmospheric as the forests it calls home (see: Velvet Cacoon, Fauna, Leech and Wake). Cascadia, as championed by these independent-to-the-point-of-secession, atavistic, vegan anarchists in places like Salem, Tacoma and Komoux Valley in Coast Salish territory, is both home and a rallying-cry.



Concepts like bio-sustainability, escape and freedom, and the rejection of traditional consumerism, form the architecture of Skagos' esoteric approach to black metal. "I believe that there is a very strong resurgent culture emerging within the insanity of our modern world," said bassist Raymond Hawes. "I think that it is a mindset that can come upon nearly anyone after they've opened themselves to the wisdom of instinct, or rather, ancient memory, and have attempted to reconnect themselves with the true forces of our world. Freedom is obviously of utmost importance, as an anarchist."

The rest of "Colossal Spell," those three-plus minutes of eerie, wind drones and deep delay are an understated prelude to the 50 minutes of true Cascadian black metal that follow. "The Drums Pound Every Night in a Glorious Celebration of Life" opens with a regal intro riff, the kind Ihsahn or Tom Warrior would be proud of, before trailing off in a near-liturgical ringing guitar chime. The rest is sweeping waves of Filosofem-worthy, minor-key, mid-paced blackness interspersed with swells of major-key, post-Aaron Turner dynamic shifts and molten Azagthoth churn. The album's standout is "Blossoms Will Sprout From the Carcass," which begins with a psych-flavored spiraling guitar motif and low-end vocal drone that ramps into an upbeat, blackened gallop that wouldn't be out of place on Instinct:Decay. Then in one swift move, guitarist/vocalist Isaac Symonds and Hawes (Iskra), Skagos' core, pull the rug out with with an absolutely-stunning, subsonic Gregorian vocal drone/chant and majestic horns that fade into gorgeous vocal harmony – and this is only at halftime. Without giving too much away, other movements include crashing stabs of distortion and noise at SUNN-level tempos, snaking feedback loops, folk instruments and more of that mournful, sleet-covered black metal peculiar to the region.

"...With a Warm Recollection" is all slow-boiling, bowed guitar drone, softly-strummed campfire acoustics and hand drums, elegiac keys and violins that ebb into the colossal "Caliginosity," another epic beginning with an echo-heavy, finger-picked acoustic intro that segues into more dark, endless drifts of (dutifully frost-bitten and snow-covered) orchestral, blackend gallop. Like the triumphal dawn on an icy, winter solstice morning, "A Night That Ends, As All Nights End, When the Sun Rises" again brings out the acoustic guitar and hand drums for an extended intro jam. Only halfway through does the double-tracked tremolo icicle plunge, heralding a trailing departure into that smeary, rain-drenched, double-kick thunder pioneered in these mist-shrouded mountains. "The album deals with the passage of summer unto winter, the spiraling iteration that is infinity," Hawes said in a post about the album on the band's blog. "From the first storms of summer, to the beautiful rot of fall, to the endless, freezing fog of winter, the album covers every moment. Spring has come, and the release has met it's first light. We are cleansed."

Though Eternal Warfare released Ást as a limited-to-300 cassette in March of this year, Skagos just released their first CD EP, Litha MMIX (Things Behind the Moon), featuring two teaser tracks from Ást and a re-working of Wolves in the Throne Room's "Of Vastness and Sorrow." Litha was originally available at Skagos' live counterpart Kamlaniye's shows during their mid-summer rituals. Even newer is a split cassette with Seattle's Wake, The Groan of Ancient Pines (Eternal Warfare). Upcoming: a CD version of Ást, an early 2010 release for their second full-length, An-Archic, and a possible three-way split with Panopticon and Throndt. "Ást and An-Archic are interdependent to one another in a cyclical manor: summer unto winter, winter unto summer," Hawes said. He said Skagos also has plans to release both in a double-CD digipack.

Now I would be editorially remiss in not mentioning Cascadian black metal's arguable superstars: the deeply polarizing, yet undeniably influential Wolves in the Throne Room. And while their phenomenal success has been met with cries of falseness from local scenesters, it's evident that the sound they helped engender resonates with people and in places far out from under the shadows from Mt. Rainier. Unfortunately for Wolves, corporate acceptance does not guarantee inventive songwriting, which is how Ást came to outshine Black Cascade in terms of cohesion, composition and innovation.



*meaning "pure love" in Icelandic and, interestingly, in Faroese, spoken by the people of the Faroe Islands, a small island group halfway between Iceland and Scotland who share close cultural ties with Iceland, yet are under Danish political authority. Faroese is believed to be among three insular Scandanavian languages, along with Icelandic and the now-extinct Norn, that desceded from Viking-era Old Norse. "Ást means cherishing the hardships of those you love, for you know that afterward they will be stronger for it," Hawes said. "Skagos sees winter as the earth's ást unto all living things." In an additional note, the pagan, folk metal band Týr, so-named for the war god son of Odin, hail from the Faroe Islands.