De Arma – Lost, Alien and Forlorn

de_arma-lost_alien_forlornA post-black metal project finally does what many of us have encouraged for some time, which is to drop the extraneous black metal and to bridge directly to the type of music they want to play. This is a Gothic/indie hybrid straight out of the early 1980s, complete with open-phrase drumming and soulful vocals. If you liked the darker side of 1980s pop like Sisters of Mercy, Dead Can Dance and Joy Division, you’ll like this detour into outspokenly emotional and catchy music.

Composed of Andreas Pettersson (Armagedda, Lönndom), Frank Allain (Fen) and percussionist Johan Marklund, De Arma (Swedish for “the poor”) previously recorded a well-acclaimed split EP. This album will hit the streets on July 2 of this year, and while it’s being marketed as depressive and dark, a better way to describe it is having the same melancholistic spirit as Burzum’s Filosofem but within the context of 1980s Gothic rock. Since black metal and indie of this nature share a similar open-chord cascading-strum style, the transition was easy, but there’s very little black metal (or dark) in this. It’s just good darkside pop.

As the inaugural release on what is presumably a post-metal indie/Gothic label Trollmusic,Lost, Alien and Forlorn will appeal to a new decade of listeners who will find exactly what made this type of music appealing in the 1980s. As essentially pleasant pop music, but which acknowledges a sense of doubt and decay about the modern world, De Arma offer a gentle transition from the bubble-world of mass consciousness to the underground of semi-realists below.

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5 thoughts on “De Arma – Lost, Alien and Forlorn”

  1. Concerned Citizen says:

    4AD records black metal?

    Blame it all on this:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNyIWBCFq5Y

    and this:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noOcglQGOmo

    1. I agree about the Ulver. While the guys in Ulver are pretty cool, and say some insightful things, they really kicked open the black metal door to pretentious imitators.

      Another band I like, The Abyss, did the same thing with technique, as Dark Funeral did. We were all misled back in the day, but we were inexperienced.

      1. Concerned Citizen says:

        Indeed, but I’ll also place the blame on bands selling out and magazines like Terrorizer being extended advertising for Peaceville alt-rock. I stopped buying new music in 2003 after realizing Hate Eternal King of all Kings was superficially brutal death metal, having none of the enveloping sense of morbidity of a Privilege of Evil or Incantation, but the reviews fooled me. Having bought Amorphis Am Universum based on reviews claiming it was the next evolution in metal also left me with anger against the mainstream metal media. Nuclear Blast and Relapse mail-order catalogs became a gallery of goth horrors. Hopefully sites like this will kill off the rock n roll business early 90s metal has been absorbed into.

        Until that happens, this will remain:
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGPvsKzrRi8

  2. mesogeios says:

    Sounds like Katatonia’s “Discouraged Ones”.

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