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AETURNUS
– Summoning The Age Old Shadows Of Death
By Paul Schwarz
Aeturnus have been a growing force in the second wave of Norwegian
black metal since their 1996 debut MCD, Dark Sorcery. However, only
now is it easy to understand why so many have nominated Aeturnus
as a band who can take black metal further in the next millennium.
Shadows of Old is why. For though Aeturnus' third full-length is
more succinct and extreme, it is still as interesting and ambitious
as any of their previous output. Black metal traditionalists, however,
may be unfavourable to some of the changes that have been wrought.
"We've focused our music more sharply than before, and there
is an element of death metal-style playing as well," says Ares,
Aeturnus' frontman and main songwriter. He is not ashamed to admit
the influence of the musical genre some call 'life metal', but he
does insist on making a few things clear. "We did it very carefully.
We don't want to be labelled as a death metal band and we aren't
one. We felt we needed some changes. We wanted to make a difference
in all kinds of areas. So we changed the sound – we cleaned
it up a lot. We only used two guitars instead of three. We tuned
up our guitars and added the death metal element into the songs
to make a little change. We didn't want to do too much of that,
but I think we just did enough to give a very positive... breath
kind of thing throughout the whole album."
The changes, though small, alter the feel of Shadows... compared
to its predecessors. However, Ares is adamant that it is still 'True
Dark Metal'.
"I think the changes are just on a kind of atmospherical [sic]
and emotional level. The experimenting and brutalities in the songs
with death metal themes and the thrashy kind of thing that we used
is making everything easier to listen to and also smashing to the
face a bit more. It is easier to do the songs from Shadows... live
because of the length but also because everything has been put together
in a much better way and is more catchy. We have been working more
strategically with everything."
So is it all new stuff when you tour?
"It is very hard for us to figure out what old songs to play
when we go on tour. We argue about it. I think that was also in
my head way back when I wrote the songs (for Shadows...): to make
it a little bit more easy to do live. You can't only play new songs
live though, you have to play some old songs. I think in the future
we're gonna do the same thing and try to step away from eight or
nine minute-long songs. We're down into four minutes on one of Shadows'...
songs. That's really not Aeturnus, but I think it is good thing
for us."
Previously, Aeturnus entertained a connected passion for the extended
album intro piece common to some of black metal, but this slate
was similarly wiped clean on Shadows...
"It's good, because I know a lot of people who were expecting,
you know, it's gonna come in with this cool intro and shit, so we
decided not to do it. The first song, like, smacks off with the
big bang, and that's something which is really cool 'cause on the
previous albums you had these intros and we concentrated on these
very long, very slow and deep, deep atmospheres. This time we just
cleaned up all that. In a way we did kind of an opposite thing.
That was the whole idea of the album."
However, Ares is careful to point out that in neither lyrics or
music does the album, strictly speaking, have a concept. "There
is a pattern (on the album), but I didn't really go for that. Lyrically,
it was just dealing with dark atmospheres in the same way as the
music does. We write about things that we define as dark in our
own way. But we've tried to write about some stuff that we haven't
written about before because in the past we have, in different ways,
maybe repeated ourselves with song lyrics. Morrigan did a lot of
the lyrics on this album, which was very good because I thought
that I was repeating myself a lot. It was really good for me also
because her lyrics are very inspiring for me when I compose. I think
also the people who buy the CDs find the lyrics appealing, and they're
not really so deep, you can really get a hang on what it's about.
The title of the CD is just kind of like a suitable title for our
musical style: bringing the elder shadows of the past up from the
deep."
But much as there is no soft instrumental opening the album, its
closing music is quite a different story.
"One of the things was that on all of the other albums we have
used a lot of acoustic instruments -- flutes and harps and all kinds
of shit. This time I wanted to change that. One idea was not to
do an instrumental this time, but I didn't wanna back down so we
decided to do a very short bagpipe instrumental as a closer. We
put another title on it because the piece is originally called 'Sleep,
Deary, Sleep', which is not really metal. It's almost like in contrast
to the other instrumentals that we've got: you picture something
much more primitive. The other instrumentals you could imagine and
fantasize. This is more to the point -- you just picture William
Wallace standing there gazing at Scotland. That's what I wanted."
For recording, many bands from black metal (e.g. Immortal and Enslaved)
have recently chosen to leave the traditional haunt of Grieghallen
in favour of Sweden's Abyss.
"We were gonna try another studio," Ares reveals, "but
everything got fucked up and we had to record the CD. So, we went
to Grieghallen. We knew that it was going to be really hard to make
such a big change in the same studio with the same producer. We
sat there and worked a lot with the different things and we didn't
know how it was gonna turn out. Then, we were done, we listened
to it, and ah, fuck, we got it! Shadows... shows that Grieghallen
is still a potential studio for making a very good metal album.
I'm really proud of walking around now and saying that Shadows...
was actually done at Grieghallen."
As
latecomers to the scene, Aeturnus' position is dubious. But Ares
has good reasons for being confident in the band's longevity.
"We try really hard to have our own style and I think that
we have succeeded. We successfully manage to mix a lot of folk music
into the metal. I think we use riffs and music mixed in with all
those usual brutal and extreme metal riffs in a way that no other
band does. We're not trying to be the fastest or the most brutal
band, we're just trying to do an extremely deep and dark thing.
To express all kinds of really dark emotions through music. It's
like Abbath said, 'Aeturnus is the only band that comes from the
abyss.' That's exactly it. If you look down into the caves and into
the deep, that's where you'll find Aeturnus."
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