Album Review: Ihsahn - "Ihsahn - Studio Version"

Inevitably, some musicians wear out their welcome.  Their career spans too many years, crosses too many generations of audiences, or simply becomes stale as living becomes comfortable and new ideas come slowly or fade away into the clutter.

Ihsahn, by contrast, continues to stay vital as he hurtles toward fifty years old by continually challenging and expanding his horizons, this time, with a totally novel twist, even as the base music itself leans heavily into his black metal roots.

“Ihsahn” the album comes in two flavors – the studio album (as read about here,) and the orchestral album, which is simply the stripped-down score of the first.  You know, we say ‘simply,’ but consider the implications of what’s being said here.  Ihsahn went out and wrote an extreme metal album while collaborating with a symphony orchestra for the duration of the act.

Plenty of artists have tried their hand at symphonic albums.  Metallica, famously.  Serj Tankian, for another.  Hell, London Philharmonic took it upon themselves to produce symphonic albums for Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd (both of which are pretty good, though the Zeppelin one is stronger.)  So, Ihsahn didn’t create a revolutionary idea, but he did revolutionize the idea by charging an orchestra to keep pace with his home base of black metal.

The success of Ihsahn’s plan is evident early, as “The Promethean Spark” gallops ahead, sounding at its base like something from the latter days of Darkthrone, but the addition of the staccato violins in the blank spaces of the main riff lend a depth and presence to the sound that is thoroughly uncommon in this brand of music.  Sure, Dimmu Borgir and Cradle of Filth and a pile of others have gone down this road to some degree, but the symphonic backing has always been manufactured.  The authenticity of “Ihsahn” is its strength – a truly organic melding of genuine symphony and metal.

Skip down to “Twice Born,” and the same kind of symbiosis of music that we talked about above rings true, but it’s by this point that the realization dawns that what Ihsahn really has done, and we mean this as a true compliment, is make a symphony sound small.  Not to say that it’s a chamber quartet or anything, but other bands who have gone the symphonic route have leaned heavily into the backing of the orchestra, which Ihsahn doesn’t do.  He instead forced them into his mold, made the strings fit the specific role he had for them, and still made his own guitars sing and dance in partnership with their newfound friends, rather than in competition, or worse, subservience to them.  (Parenthetically, it strikes that listening to the second version of this record, the strictly orchestral one, may be a sparse experience.  But that’s neither here nor there.)

“Ihsahn” is not always an easy listen – those without the ear for more extreme forms of metal may still find some of the constructions difficult - but even at its low moments the album is always at least academically interesting.  About three minutes into “Blood Trails to Love,” there’s a layered, almost jazz-y interlude that sounds out of place, but not in a bad way; it’s just a permutation of the two forces coming together in a unique way, leading to an unexpected, and thereby disjointed portion of the record.

There are, on the back end of the record, a couple of cuts that wander too long and get lost in the woods, so to speak.  Perhaps the temptation of working with all these elements was too overwhelming not to try and compose a singular opus, and there is some nobility in the attempt.  It’s not that these songs are bad, they’re just not interesting in the face of the far more novel fusions in the first half of the record.

Full marks to Ihsahn for pulling this monumental task together.  When his eponymous album sticks to task and keeps the durations down, he’s written as intriguing and compelling an album as any in the last few years.  Inconsistency is the worst criticism one can level at the record, and there are far worse sins.  Certainly the great moments, and even the merely good ones, are worth the time and examination.  Ihsahn, to this point, refuses to overstay his welcome.

Album Review: Ihsahn - "Arktis"

Listening to Ihsahn’s new record “Arktis” is in many ways the stereotype experience of listening to any record of any solo project, with all the benefits and trappings that implies.  Ihsahn is the long-running epithet for Vegard Tveitan, founding member of Emperor and accomplished multi-instrumentalist in his own right.  His diverse musical musings make up the bulk of the new album from his solo project, which means that first and foremost, a listener must divorce him or herself from the conception that Ihsahn will sound just like Emperor.  Solo records tend to travel one of three paths, which are a) that the artist wishes to leave their musical home to experiment with some other ideas, b) the artist wants to perform in a genre they are not commonly associated with, or most often c) which is both, and that’s where we find “Arktis.”

The album begins much in the usual Ihsahn mold, with some airy keys and a heavily atmospheric black metal sensibility, coupled with the usual growled vocals.  We get this for a small smattering of songs in the open, and while they’re fine for what they are, only “Disassembled” shows us the true potential of this record, with a thumping riff juxtaposed against a surprisingly earnest and soft outro.

The middle of “Arktis” is where the value really lies, as we see Ihsahn step outside the death-black metal box and open up into new possibilities heretofore undiscovered.  “South Winds” is both weirdly beautiful and incredibly haunting, a deep and nearly subliminal keyboard line that bores into the ear and sets the stage for the soft but unquiet melody of the song.  This is all decorated with a mix of rasped and sinisterly whispered vocals, all of which combines to create a unique and catchy experience.

By comparison, and this is where the versatility of a solo project can show through - particularly as Ihsahn takes the place of Emperor and makes its own impression – we are shortly thereafter asked to partake in “Until I Too Dissolve,” which begins with a wonderful but contextually out of place Van Halen riff.  But this is where we’ve seen other acts like Richard Kruspe’s Emigrate and Peter Tagtgren’s PAIN really shine, right?  In showing their devotion and respect for trends that worked in the past, but still turning those elements into something new and enjoyable.  “Until I Too Dissolve” is no different, combining the easy hook of a proto-metal riff with the modern pounding of death metal to conjure a song that is both dangerous and easily enjoyable.

The disappointment of “Arktis” lies in the fact that there isn’t more of this kind of experimentation on the record.  Much of the second half of the record starts to blend together or shifts too easily back into the usual black metal patterns.  That isn’t to say that those songs are poorly constructed or anything less than professional caliber, but it does put a damper on the expansive promise of the two moments mentioned above.  The rest of the tracks sway between the metal harshness of Ihsahn’s legacy and a few attempts to deliver more emotional content, but there’s not as much pure enjoyment there.

So “Arktis” has some brilliance between beginning and end, but doesn’t consistently resonate with it.  Ihsahn as a musical project is in the transitional period between solo project and full-time fixture, so it’s understandable that the man and band would try to establish a base, but there’s a richer vein that could well be explored in the future.