Void Omnia - “Remanence of a Ghost Haunt”
My interest in black metal these days is mainly confined to Fast, No Bullshit Black Metal. I feel like the "fast" part is self-explanatory. The "no bullshit" part is perhaps more in the ear of the beholder. To me, it means no interludes (other than intro/outros), atmospheric adornments, progressive passages, top hat horseshittery, or other elements that are more gilding than strictly necessary. I want guitars. I want drums. I want vox. The rest can take a vacation in the lux black metal islands known as The Casios.
Here's the thing: That doesn't mean "bullshit" is bad. I'm not throwing that word around as a pejorative. It's just an appropriately trve descriptor for a preponderance of stuff. For instance, Blut Aus Nord has a lot of bullshit, and it's probably my favorite black metal band this decade. But, at this very moment when I’m watching the world fall to pieces in real time, I'm looking for something more austere, rawer, stripped-down. If BAN is a gothic velvet couch that will swallow you during the night and transport you to a Lovecraftian hell dimension, I just kind of want to sleep on the Transilvanian Hunger floor for a few weeks.
Now, it's easier to properly define FNBSBM — and man, is that 'b' doing some critical work in that acronym — by what it isn't. Svrm is fast but has some bullshit, that being the Drudkh-esque folkisms that round out its aural narrative. Again, svrm is good, but it's not FNBSBM for that reason. On the other hand, Death Fortress and the suspiciously similar Final Eclipse are no-bullshit but aren't always fast, choosing instead long journeys shot at 24 frames per second that meander toward the mountaintop. Does this make any sense? I'm not crazy, right? Don't answer that. Even if I’m not nuts, all of that might push FNBSBM into the realm of "know it when I hear it," even if I think the tests are pretty straightforward.
The best example of FNBSBM over the past few years is Windswept's The Onlooker, an album that fixes my frilly-shirt misgivings about some similar artists by going, and this is a technical term I picked up in my brief tenure in music school, balls out for 38 minutes. However, since that band is probably Roman Saenko's attempt at making Hate Forest appropriate for polite society, we're not going to touch that one. So, in its place, let's take a listen to Void Omnia's criminally overlooked 2016 album, Dying Light, which does, in fact, have some mid-paced parts, but let's not let that wreck my thesis.
The Oakland quintet — a guitar, guitar, bass, drum, vocals formation — dropped Dying Light in 2016 on the haven for FNBSBM, Vendetta Records. Like the cream of FNBSBM, Void Omnia is here for a grim time, not a long time, keeping these five songs under a 35-minute runtime. The songs may be long, but considering that the borders of these songs blur together, the album is short. And while Dying Light is ultra-atmospheric, that atmosphere is a byproduct of the band going hard as hell, not an artificial atmosphere that's slapped on later like inedible fondant. To wit, in an interview with Wonderbox Metal in 2016, the band said about its compositional process, "Vocals come last and are really used more to add layer and atmosphere and dynamics to the pre-existing tones and rhythms." They get it. Begone, outsourced synths; use what you've already got.
Void Omnia's favorite on Dying Light is "Emptied Heartless," the seven-minute closer that was supposed to be a bridge to future albums because it was "more vicious and violent sounding, but will maintain its melody while still focusing on solid composition." There would be no future albums. In fact, no black metal band should make any pronouncements about future albums.
Anyway, "Emptied Heartless"? Rips. Opening with an iteration of the "Freezing Moon" riff, the song soon explodes into full-speed mode, sounding like how the quasar on the album cover looks. From there, it's just an all-out ass-kicking, taking extremely brief quiet/loud breaks to cut down on ear fatigue.
My favorite cut on the album, though, is “Remanence of a Ghost Haunt,” which sticks closer to the FNBSBM ideal by stomping the gas pedal even during the half-time parts. That riff in the verses is that second-wave superlative good stuff: raw, stark, evil. And, I don't know, man, that stuff just does it for me. It's like being hooked up to an unceasing IV drip of adrenaline, just blast after blast after blast, blasting its way straight into my bloodstream.
Once you start making the FNBSBM connection, you start hearing it everywhere. Because this stupid blog hasn’t hit my preferred word count yet, let’s also cover Saqra’s Cult’s equally overlooked 2019 album The 9th King.1 The FNBSBM hallmarks are there: four songs, 30 minutes, an insatiable desire for speed. The Belgium trio’s finest moment is the opening title track. Kicking off with solo vocals that eventually holler out the song title with a cinematic ‘they’re doing the line!’ flair, the track takes off, riding a slip n’ slide riff for the next seven minutes. Rules. All hail, FNBSBM.
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