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 BLODULV - Drunk on the Pope’s Blood
By Nathan T. Birk
“Our lives haven’t changed one fucking bit, so the targets are firmly placed in the face of everyone and everything—as usual, tank fucking warfare.”
Sure, the lives of the Swedish black metal mafia otherwise known as Blodulv may not’ve changed one iota—nor, strictly speaking, their scraped ‘n’ scabrous sound in kind—but they’re as prolific as ever, with the Quality surely keeping apace with the Quantity. Still well-rooted in the gnarled, distortion-drenched tangles of Burzum’s Filosofem (“a fucking child-slayer of an album,” beams lyricist Aeifur) and operating at a brisk, exceptionally arrogant gait, not only have the trio/quartet/quintet recently released split records with comrades Aska and Deadwood Murder, they’re set to release their third LP and second album in less than a year: the appropriately titled III – Burial, tentatively due at this spring. Before we delve deeper, the exceedingly strange lineup must be “unraveled”...
“It's a riddle wrapped in a mystery, isn't it?” Aeifur rhetorically asks. “Okay, this is the deal: Grendel composes all the music, guitars, bass, and drums. Occasionally, Orcus contributes with a riff or two, but that happens very rarely since he has a major drug habit—he’s pretty out of it most of the time. I write all the lyrics and handle things like this, as well as the extremely small amount of mastering and such that goes into Blodulv’s music. Morn does all the vocals and also provides us with the layouts/artwork for the records, but he’s far from being a gentleman – the stench alone makes your skin curl. I agree, the lineup’s pretty bizarre, but it’s well-oiled machinery; everyone does what they do best, and no one questions anyone else. I guess that's why we’re so productive – there’s no arguing about anything. This is the music and these are the lyrics and this is how it turns out. We never do any retakes when we record – Morn listens to the track once, then sings my lyrics. It always turns out grim and sick, as he is a master craftsman.”
Musically, between the advance tracks for III I’ve had the sick-sick-sick pleasure to hear and those on the Aska split—the title, The Purest Cold Precision, should say more than enough—Blodulv are presently driving deeper into the heart of BM, even deeper into the heart of Bathory's first album, bringing out the dirty rock 'n' roll underpinnings of that original sound whilst keeping it cripplingly cruel 'n' briskly arrogant and even a bit (more) abstract by extension. Aeifur, on the hand, contends, “I don’t think we’re quite as rock ‘n’ roll as Bathory’s first one—you never know what that hash-head Grendel is cooking up in his disgusting little apartment.” By turns, this latest development perversely is both more “welcoming” yet just as fucked-up as a result, altogether making the current Blodulv aesthetic vastly more inscrutable and (some would say) WRONG—in fact an intention to draw people toward Blodulv, only to poison their souls if they're willing to be corrupted? Is there daresay a subtler (pure/cold) perfection at play here?
“I guess some songs are in some highly dubious way more catchy, but the sound’s rawer than ever before, so they kind of cancel each other out,” the lyricist alleges. “What do you mean ‘if they’re willing’? We tell them when to be poisoned and corrupted, and we expect you all to obey like nice little doggies. And ‘subtler’ and ‘perfection’—what are these words that you speak? We’ve never heard of such words—don’t you mean ‘vomit’ and ‘fist-fucking’?”
As for the poisons that inspire their souls, Aeifur pulls no punches. “I can tell you this much, and this is the absolute truth: Almost every note of music and every word in every song we’ve ever done is composed/written in the chokehold of some kind of drug. Grendel and Orcus are the main drug-fiends in the band—hash, downers, tranquilizers of different kinds, with the occasional travels to the vast ice deserts of the cursed Triton thrown in for diversity. For me, it’s mainly whiskey/vodka, pain-pills, and pot. I’ve made it my personal agenda to always be drunk when I do anything Blodulv-related, like this interview. Morn’s probably the cleanest of us all – he gets drunk three or four times a week, that’s it. We suspect he’s a government agent or something…”
And at the end of the day? “We wanted to achieve the most with as little work as possible but still produce grim fucking black metal, our way.”
www.eerieartrecords.com
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