LaRM day 133 (Emmy the Great-Emperor)

A day of contrasts today with some whimsical acoustic singer-songwriting followed by some of the most brutal and technically skilful Norweigian black metal. First up is charming folkie-type stylings from Emmy the Great. Zo and I saw Emmy play at the Borderline supporting the wonderful Emma Pollock a few years back and although there were only about six of us there she played an absolutely charming set. In some ways the downbeat coffee house approach that she takes is better served played in person than on record where the songs can sometimes come across as either a bit underwritten or else a little corny. Nevertheless First Love (2009) has some lovely songs and some lovely touches. Despite her slightly middle-class girlish voice there's a direct and often disconcerting approach lyrically and although at first listen her songs sound unchallenging if a little dour, there's actually some interesting and sometimes rather melancholic stuff going on, and for every slightly naff 'On the Museum Island' there's a sparkling 'Bad Things Coming, We Are Safe'. When First Love fails it sounds like something designed to be half-listened to in the car, but when it works it's lovely. Second album Virtue (2011) while being essentially more of the same, is actually quite a step forward. This is due in small part to a clearly substantially increased production budget, but there's also greater attention to songwriting and arrangement on Virtue. It's a shame that Emmy will never attain the instinctive brilliance of Laura Marling but as a second tier version of the same intentions Virtue is a really decent effort. There are strengths in the songwriting that were absent on First Love ('Exit Night Juliet's Theme' and closer 'Trellick Tower' are particularly strong) but the heightened production and more studied approach mean that the charm of the first album is also largely absent. It's not a problem as such, but it does show that Emmy's best bet probably lies somewhere in the middle of the two albums.

So, by a shattering contrast we have Emperor's black metal masterpiece Prometheus: The Discipline of Fire and Demise (2001) which is a blast of absolute Norwegian metal power. This is spiky glove time to the max. Total spiky metal spike, with some serious corpsepaint action to boot. Although to be fair, by the time Prometheus was released Emperor had moved beyond all that dressing up as zombies nonsense and were entirely locked on to the idea of making records of authority. And that's what Prometheus is. I remember a review in Metal Hammer or somewhere that said that if you're genuinely interested in music of any kind then you would have to like Prometheus. It's true. Even if you hate metal entirely the sheer brilliance of Prometheus' construction and performance is still mystifyingly good. It was also way ahead of its time, creating a template for a sort of concept metal which has since become extremely common, and to listen to it now, against Mastodon for instance, it stands up fantastically well. It's massive, crushing, absurdly intricate and, of course, very, very silly, and it beggars belief that apart from the martial thrash drumming it's entirely the work of one bloke (frontman Ihsahn having effectively sidelined churchburner guitarist Samoth). The absurdity of the whole enterprise is demonstrated by the album's opening, being a gentle harpsichord piece which then disappears instantly and immediately beneath a barrage of hyperkinetic drum and thrash guitar. All of the standard pieces are in place really, the growling "sinister" vocals, the shrill speed solos, the frantically unpredictable time signatures, the ridiculous lyrical conceits, but it's all done so, so well and is so inexplicably accessible that it's hard to imagine that it would be possible to top it. 'Empty' kind of shows off with a casual arrogance the ease with which Emperor could do this stuff, while simultaneously either showing off a sly sense of humour or else reaching the heights of daftness by weaving a jaunty chamber string quartet into the frantic metal mayhem. Prometheus is one of those albums that if there's any justice will be rediscovered in years to come and more widely hailed as a truly great piece of work.

And finally for today is the massive Emperor career overview, Scattered Ashes: A Decade of Imperial Wrath (2003) which covers their entire output from 1992-2001. Two and a half of hours of the most inventive and rigorous black metal ever recorded, it serves as an uncomfortable reminder that deeply unpleasant people can still do astonishingly creative things, and I do wonder whether frontman Ihsahn saw the gruesome personalities of fellow bandmembers Trym and Samoth as useful tools for an intellectual project (both Trym and Samoth were involved in variously unpleasant criminal activities and were personally close to both odious fascist sympathising murderers Faust and Varg Vikernes, whereas Ihsahn appears to have had little or nothing to do with the same activities or crowd). Anyway, pretty much all of the material on Scattered Ashes is as good as this notoriously challenging and absurd genre can get and there's no denying the astonishing technical skill involved. The songs aren't arranged chronologically so it's hard to really chart the development of Emperor's sound, although some songs are clearly denser and more smartly constructed than others, but to be honest they were pretty complex and structurally rigorous from the very start. The cover versions and rarities of the second disc are interesting as curios, but the tracks from the proper studio albums are the real meat of the thing and listening to them is simultaneously hugely enlivening and liable to make you feel a bit grubby.