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 LUGUBRUM - “Welcome to the Junkyard”
By Nathan T. Birk
“Lugubrum should always have this lugubrious feeling around it,” begins vocalist Barditus, “especially when humor’s at play. Let me explain with an example. Imagine a corpse lying in an open coffin. It's not funny—although the smell makes me laugh, but that's off the record—but on the other hand, serene and solemn. And imagine artificial teeth accidentally falling out of someone's mouth—that's maybe the funniest thing to watch ever! Now, combine the two of them: You're looking at a dead body, and suddenly the dental prosthesis drops out of the open mouth...if I’d ever watch this, I'd certainly laugh myself to death! And that’s what Lugubrum is for me—intricate combinations, paradoxes, anomalies, all merged into an indestructible form that makes it stand out for ourselves and the people who are at least digesting it.”
Digestion is an important process in Lugubrum’s brown (nether)world. To some—black metal purists, mostly, but who’s to say?—this long-running Belgium BM band’s infuriating to the extreme; to others, a fresh breath of foul, idiosyncratic air—and idiosyncratic to the unfathomable extreme, make no mistake. As the ubiquitous “they” say, one man’s trash is another’s treasure. Never mind the banjos ‘n’ saxophones, never mind the moonshine ‘n’ shotguns, never mind the reggae breakdowns or farmer’s rags or the ever-present notion of taking the piss or even those equally ever-present “Beer Us or Die!” slogans: Simply put and without hyperbole, Lugubrum set their own standards, only to break them time and again. Alas, we have LP#7 in De Vette Cuecken, an eerily stumbling ‘n’ fumbling affair that’s perhaps the closest a BM band’s gotten to approximating the Birthday Party’s skronk ‘n’ swing; already, the next album’s been recorded this past December, and tentatively titled Heilige Dwazen. But instead of prattling about semantics and potential post-irony, let’s hear it straight from the horse’s mouth—proverbially speaking, of course…
“Direction-wise,” contends guitarist/songwriter Midgaars, “Cuecken is sliding further downhill the brown, sloppy nether-regions of our minds. It was written and recorded in my old home; we didn’t change diets or beer brand or anything. We’re like a slug that’s slowly crawling towards the edge of a beer bottle, the inevitable apex which is also its death. The path ahead is clear, though there are some surprises lurking—
admittedly, they get bigger with each album. With ageing, one gets to be slightly more eccentric, not to mention deaf. On the whole, what transpires is a reflection of the richness of the palette we work with—a wide variety of robust shades of brown. We enjoy so many types of music, from ragtime to obscure ritual chanting, from blues to street organ tunes, from French chanson to military marches, the list goes on and on…. In between, we still listen to the golden oldies like Autopsy, Pungent Stench, early Darkthrone, Beherit, and Unholy. If you pass all of this through the mincer, bearing in mind the right proportions and spices, you get something like Cuecken.”
As for what constitutes their “Boersk Blek Metle” demi-tag, Midgaars reveals that it “means ‘crudely produced, with the smell of manure in the nostrils while recording’. We’ve not used the term on Cuecken anymore, because the last thing we want is to be stuck in certain patterns. Furthermore, the next album is the first not recorded in a rural area, so it would be silly to continue it – the manure-smell would be absent, for one thing. ‘BBM’ is an apt moniker for our music, but these days I think plain ‘Lugubrum’ says enough, really. Each album sounds and looks different, but each could not have been produced by any other band.
“As far as taking the piss is concerned,” the six-stringer delves deepest, “we restrict ourselves to mankind. If our audience is offended, they shouldn’t buy our stuff or come to see us play, because they’ve clearly missed the point. The reason we’ve been given a sense of humor is because we bloody need it—it’s the only way one can cope with being human. All these painted ‘true’ black metal pimples may think themselves above this, but they have to stand in line in the shop to buy toilet paper just like their fuckin' grannies. Anyway, much of the weirdness on display is lost even to us, forgetting where it ever came from. Like, for instance, what’s up with the armpit-penises—who ever came up with that?! Or perhaps the fans didn’t even notice up to now, glancing anxiously towards their record collections, cursing the day they ever brought home a Lugubrum album.”
http://drink.to/lugubrum
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