Rating: 8.0

Country: Sweden

Genre: Black Metal

Record Label: Total Holocaust

Release Date: 2007

Track list:
1. Döende  
2. Av saknad släcker jag ljuset
3. Ondkall  
4. Känsla av livets nästa skede  
5. Den svarta angstens essens   
6. Det man med själen... 
7. Ekot av bikt   
8. Döende (en avslutning)   

Band Website: Bergraven

Bergraven - Dodsvisioner

Bergraven (Pär Gustafsson): all instruments & vocals

Novelty is a double-edged sword; twisting a medium and provoking its artistic limits can certainly assist in developing a broader contextual understanding of one's craft, but at the end of the day, throwing paint-drenched bananas at a white wall doesn't make you Vincent van Gogh. I wanted to like this since I read its promising press release, so it is with significant relief that I report the Swedish band Bergraven is not an example of the latter case.

To be succinct, Dödsvisioner is a highly polished black metal release that devotes every note to worshipping the aesthetic of eerie ambience. It most notably contains overtones of post-rock prettiness, a vocalist with a ruthlessly Germanic accent, and strangest of all, this is all padded with distorted steel pedal harmonics (see the opening passage of the song "Ondkall" for the most haunting example, but it's omnipresent). It's often dissonant to a fault, yet -- paradoxically -- there's always a sort of deranged pop sensibility lurking beneath the profoundly warped surface, like a black metal Katatonia reflected by some novelty funhouse mirror.

While the guitar tone is quite incisive and bass-heavy, the mix is unusually soft and nebulous -- more akin to something one might hear in a shoegaze album, actually. Furthermore, the album's arrangement is hugely spacious, rife with several minute-long patches of clean minor key noodling swimming in pulsing delay, making drifting off to it a rather surreal and hallucinogenic experience. It's still more Mayhem than Boredoms, but it's nonetheless yet another black metal album that could be described as psychedelic. Oh, and drift off to this you will, because in what is possibly Dödsvisioner's only major flaw, the music sandwiched between warbling atmospheric tinkering unravels in a tiresomely narrative pattern rather than progressing with a degree of consistency that justifies its clever veneer.

In all mediums of art, it is imperative to be able to distinguish between progression and self-gratifying abstraction. One can be transcendental if done right -- it not only provides escapism, but makes you content to be alive and where you are now -- and the other is basically just masturbation. The fellow behind Bergraven seems to have a firm grasp of this dichotomy, ensuring that substance and clarity of artistic expression ultimately dominates weirdness, even at the music's intimidatingly broad apex of discordance. A delirious post-rock/black metal mutant, Dödsvisioner generously rewards close listening in a manner of which both metal and atmospheric albums are generally incapable. Very recommended left-field listening.

August 10th, 2008