When we write about music, we often proceed from a premise that is useful but essentially false: namely, that music has a fixed, objective reality. Don’t we all know, at some level, that music is never the same? Not just from one listener to another listener, but even – and sometimes especially – from the same listener encountering the same piece of music at different times. If I’m not in the right headspace for it, even my favorite albums of all time will land in my ears like the worst garbage I’ve ever heard. We are dreadfully imperfect receivers, conveying any given auditory sensation along the faulty wiring of memory, mood, experience, and physiology to create a soundstage of vastly different auditory perceptions.
The matter at hand today is the second album from Sweden’s Escumergamënt, Apparebat Eidolon Senex, and the reason for the hectoring introduction about the subjectivity of music is that in the half-dozen or so times I have listened to the album, it has never once sounded the same. This time, it captivates and ensorcells, while this time, it blurs and hums away exactly as expected. Here, the guitars slink so far beneath the keys as to evaporate completely, while there, the songs flicker and persist like the honorable ghosts of a vanished kingdom. Even my least splendid encounter with the album has bottomed out somewhere in the vicinity of “remarkably pleasant boredom,” which is a higher floor than many albums’ ceilings.
According to the (intentionally) scant information available, Escumergamënt is a black metal quartet comprised of Swedish musicians from projects including Stilla, Setherial, and Bergraven, and for some of you, that might already be more than enough inducement to mash the ‘play’ button. For everyone else, expect staunchly traditionalist black metal steeped in a buzzing, quavering, richly melodic atmosphere. Of the band members’ affiliated projects, my particular busted ears hear the most overlap with Stilla, but Escumergamënt’s music sometimes also recalls Abigor, early Gehenna, and the ever-underrated Lunar Aurora. One particularly strong element of the album is the vocals, which are a powerfully raspy snarl somewhere between Emperor’s Ihsahn and Enslaved’s Grutle.
Nevertheless, the type of “atmosphere” offered here may appear to some as a haunting, mystical haze that suffuses the songs with mournful indeterminacy, while appearing to others as a crutch-like use of advanced recording tools and instrumental techniques to mimic the genre’s foundational (and likely accidental) murk and mystery. “Laudanum and a Silver Scalpel,” for example, is the song that sinks deepest into an eerily hypnotic and simplistic drive, relying almost on a modal structure with blitzed and bleary keys that waver out of the mist and then recede. Or, y’know, maybe it just sounds like Transilvanian Hunger.
In a sour mood, the keyboard melody on “To the Graves!” is a cloying sing-song, but when I’m feeling locked in, it takes on an appealingly melancholy flavor. “The Corpses Heaven Refused to Take” hits its strongest stride with a doom-inflected passage which feels like, if left to develop further, it might have plumbed even more glittering depths, but then on a tune like “Radiant Glimmering Whorl,” Escumergamënt crushes its way through a basically perfect five and a half minutes that alternate between triumphant melodic sweeps and punishing aggression. Does this mean the band needs to pick and choose between their many modes of attack? Categorically no. On Apparebat Eidolon Senex (as with music writ large), the real meat lies in that unknowable lacuna between stimulus and response.
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