Havohej - Man and Djinn
Review: The triumphant return of Havohej occurs in a provocative nihilism in which guitars are assaulted and reduced to a rumbling texture of harmonic shape while vocals and constant battery encoding rhythmic opposition to a self-established dominant theme bring forth one of the few truly resonant statements of black metal in unleashed hatred of all that is melodic, easy to like, friendly and in any way consistent about its statements and theory to the point of being stamped from form. Those who criticize this release must acknowledge this: Havohej tested the capacity of the underground for abstraction with conceptually visual and neo-Wagnerian intent to reduce our rockish expectations of metal and bring black metal to a new level of form if nothing else, hatefully, spitefully and bigotedly destroying guitar and song expectations in structural rubric entirely with roaring, virulent and nasty music.
Best conceived as a whole or in the instant of parsing, this work consists of an essential theme made ludicrous in essence and then divided multiple times as it devolves across a trellis structure of existential ambitions and ideas. This trellis in the subconscious mind seen as patterns in the pulsing landscape of these bare and confrontationally human songs of themes altering listener perceptive expectations of reality through mood, is recognizable in organic unfolding of structure through deliberate acts of seeming randomness which in their assembly as sensible object assert ambitions that both subvert and nurture social conceptions of individual growth and value. In this some might say this release is relegated to an obscure echelon of metal warriors but the caveat must be added, "and like all releases from Havohej, its ideas will be propagated by others who are both getting a bonus by ripping it off and doing its work by spreading the virus."
In a bassy echoing nothingspace the rumbling distant guitar is reduced to the simplest of tonal distinctions as it fills a space with a humorous satire of black metal "true" guitar, assaulting both form by exceeding it and convention by violating melody like a busy occultist left alone with the corpse of Christ. The slackly conceived yet exhilaratingly self-obsessed morbid chanting of Ledney goes over the top consistently and thrusts into the face of the listener a performance art of disintegrating persona, emphasizing the lawless nature of black metal. Beyond this instrumentation is pure noise which in resonant symphony texturally wraps narrative changes within developing theme in the esoteric but absolutist tradition of black metal.