Ildjarn - Strength & Anger
Review: In a ferocious assault on music itself, Ildjarn move a trademark style of raw and hypnotic information symbolism in riff form into the realm of both extremity and noise, in which all cycles return to their origins in either peace or abrupt destruction. Melted by unfinished friction layers of strings and mechanical percussion interweave with a hoarse and horrified scream of morbidity which cadences the unravelling of the cryptogram to each song.
Small bursts of variation on streams of intense and primal rhythm with one- and two-chord riffing to match an undulating bass/guitar throb that paralyzes small animals caught in the road, probe into the consciousness of the listener with the expansion of each song. It is both pop and aggressively removed from social appearance, inverting the easy listening of mainstream music to infectious but malevolent ear viruses. On this album the guitar becomes a bashing grind which gallops to a pace of escape before regressing, uneasily, into dark mood inducing rhythmic noise baths or slowly evolving ultimate minimalism in a chord, note or rumble being escalated to central metaphor.
The resonant use of harmony to code out melody through serial transmission of information or silence creates an abstract symbologism itself, in which an emphasis like the repeated motions of a dance and the transfer of energy within the kineticism of the dancer through reference and development swings forth variations that foreshadow or absorb elements of theme. As tones saturate a new mood emerges in which change is vital and from that Ildjarn wield strength like warriors, inching alteration toward a language for each song in which a brief message of strength, will and growth like that of the transcendental consciousness of trees performing its own exegesis stabilizes before evaporation.
The crashing dive of black metal into conformity was thwarted by the development of this band among a few comrades and its inertia provided resistance and an adherence to the sensibility of the primitive and streamlined reductionist aesthetic of underground adversarial music. Its spirit immanent in the work generates an afterimage sensation of both energy toward change for will and a nihilistic, observant determination slipped under the curtain of sleep by the imperious demands of consciousness.