Enslaved
- Story by Rod Smith
Norwegian progressive black metal arriors Enslaved deliver their second album of the year candidate in as many years
According to Scandinavian tradition, nine is the most important number. The Norse universe encompasses nine worlds, all nourished by tree of life Yggdrasil—the great, nine-rooted ash that chief deity Odin hung from for nine days before his death, resurrection and assumption of godhead long before the birth of Christ.
Given the number’s big-deal status, how could Enslaved—whose manifest commitment to the Northern Mysteries dates back to their 1992 debut demo Yggdrasill—only put eight songs on Ruun? “You don’t need the number nine; it’s always Ragnarök—the Doom,” bassist and vocalist Grutle Kjellson explains. “That goes without saying. It doesn’t even need a song.”
Clearly, these guys know shit you can’t find on the Internet. Sure, there’s plenty online regarding Ragnarök: “Fate of the Gods”—the great battle between the forces of order and chaos that heralds the end of life as we know it. Yggdrasil, already holding the seeds of a new universe with more illuminated inhabitants, remains intact. A great conflagration consumes pretty much everything else. And there’s not a goddamn thing anyone, human or divine, can do about it. It’s inevitable, the entire scenario—right down to who kills who—scripted by the very forces of nature themselves,
But that’s all old school; Ruun’s take on the gestalt is considerably more up-to-date. “Ivar [Bjørnson, guitarist, and with Kjellson, founder of Enslaved] and I worked out the concept while writing the lyrics. It’s about how communities—or individuals—react to a great disaster. There are seven presences or forces inside yourself, often working against one another in an egoistic way. There’s the humoristic, semi-evil force. You have the inner conscience. The conscience programmed into you by nature. You have compassion, empathy for other beings. You have pure self-interest. You have strength. Within the human mind there’s a lot of conflict. Sometimes it turns to chaos, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A lot of creative activity can come out of chaos. The eighth song is the culmination of the seven before it.”
He’s calling from an office in the Bergen building where a good chunk of the Norwegian quintet’s ninth album was recorded. “It doesn’t even really have a name,” he says, “‘The Garage,’ maybe? It’s where all Bergen’s metalheads and rock and rollers hang out.” In a few hours, Kjellson, Bjørnson, guitarist Arve Isdal, keyboardist Herbrand Larsen, and drummer Cato Bekkevold will convene downstairs with fans and friends to preview the first video from Ruun, “Path to Vanir.” “We’re having a party with a lot of surprises and the Hole in the Sky Awards for young musicians. We’re gonna play two songs, too. Then we’ll just hang out and drink beer. It’ll be a fun night.”
The band made videos for “Path to Vanir” and “Essence” with its usual hell-bent-for-quality, DIY fervor; they shot both over a single three-day weekend in the desolate mountain wilderness of western Norway’s Vatnehalsen region, accessible only by snowmobile or train. “We took a train to a tourist hotel and hired the whole thing,” Kjellson explains. “It was the off-season, really cold, so we got a good rate. We had a great time, worked 12 hours a day and watched TV, drank beer and listened to music the rest of the time. We did the whole thing really cheaply. We don’t have a million dollars to do the videos. Ivar and I scripted them and we used young, skilled producers and directors and tried to build something together, rather than hiring people who already had big reputations who’d try to override our ideas.”
A mid-tempo rocker driven by a wickedly elliptical riff for most of its duration, “Path to Vanir” is a change of pace for screamer Kjellson, who enhances the track with a fistful of well-placed death growls. After a rectilinear digression, Kjellson and Larsen share clean vocal duties over gently strummed guitar on the song’s penultimate section, before the brief but effective return to full speed and power, highlighted by Bjørnson’s poignant solo. Like the rest of the album, “Path” is Enslaved’s most fully realized foray into progressive metal to date—and a huge departure from the black and Viking metal the band built its reputation on in the ’90s.
“It’s a very natural development,” says Kjellson. “Of course, we’re an extreme metal band, but we mostly take inspiration from everything else—especially from the progressive rock and roll from the end of the ’60s, bands like King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Rush, Genesis. We don’t have any sort of ‘Let’s make the next song sound like King Crimson’ sort of agenda or anything. Making songs comes very naturally for Ivar. He could make two albums a month without any problems. It just comes out of him all the time, and most of it is great. I’m very glad we have him, ’cause otherwise we’d probably be working on our third album right now.”
If such were the case, they’d probably be doing so in the very building Kjellson occupies. He and Larsen recorded some of Ruun’s vocals in an office downstairs, using Cubase software. Bjørnson recorded guitar parts in his office, also in the building. Keyboard, bass and drums were recorded at Oslo’s Amper Tone Studios, not far from Propeller Studios, where the band mixed the album with co-producer Mike Hartung, before sending it off to Stockholm for mastering.
“Oh, and Cato did some of the drum pre-production in Lisbon,” says Kjellson. “It was a very international effort.”
It’s also a cogent statement of the band’s even-handed beliefs. “There’s no dogma in the Norse tradition,” says Kjellson, “no blind following. It’s more a series of guidelines. All the gods have a positive side and a very negative side as well, just like human beings. All the elder religions are built on a similar system, centered around fertility and the harvest. Norse beliefs—and the Norse pantheon—are very similar to their Roman, Greek and Egyptian counterparts. You can take it all the way back to Sumer. Christianity tried to make everything else look ridiculous, while adapting all the ancient holidays. It was a pretty smart thing to do, but it makes them look more like a political movement, rather than a proper religion. Everything was based on fear and violence and still is. Look at the world today—look at Bush. What a dumbass!”
Kjellson’s interest in the US is more than casual. Enslaved hope to make it back here in time for Christmas—er, Yule. And by his estimation, the bassist has between 150 and 200 fourth cousins in North and South Dakota. “I can’t say I’m very proud of my relatives,” he says. “Of course, they’re all hyper-Christians who like Bush. While we’re not in contact, I suspect that a lot of them are these Norse Americans that we read about here from time to time. They actually have small villages where they still speak Norwegian, this kind of Norwegian that they spoke here in the ’20s, with this sort of singing quality. I guess they’re really hyper-conservative, against unmarried people living together. They were shocked by the situation in their home country. Are people really having kids without being married? It’s funny.”
Kjellson knows what the rustic Americans would think of their cousin—even Europeans in some circles still inexplicably find his shirtless existence intimidating. Last October, a photographer for metal webzine Lost in Berlin sent a photo of the bassist, on stage with his Sony Ericsson cell phone, to the company, hoping they’d put it on their website. He got a reply stating that Sony couldn’t post the image because some their “customers might find it offensive.” (Check it out at lost-in-berlin.de/enslaved.php.)
“I thought it was hilarious,” muses Kjellson. “Am I that offending? I guess I’m very provocative. I dunno. Maybe they thought I was playing the tool of Satan.”
Uptight corporate entities aside, Kjellson sees the band’s home turf situation becoming rosier. “In Europe, there were too many things going on at the end of the ’90s,” he recalls. “In the big German cities like Hamburg, there were concerts every day, metal tours, three or four at the same time. People on the whole continent lost interest in extreme metal. Then the power metal—Helloween clones and things like that—started to get big again, which was a bad thing for bands like us. Now it’s getting good again, especially in Norway. We’re playing all the big festivals here this summer. There’s a growing interest in progressive extreme metal all over Europe, which is great for us.”
If progressive is the new black, that’s as much because of the music’s differences with the past as its similarities. To wit: you can listen to any and every song on Ruun without first having to track down your great-grandfather’s slide rule. For all its grandeur and complexity, even the epic “Essence” finds its way from the earholes to the brain’s pleasure centers without strenuous effort on the listener’s part.
“A lot of so called progressive bands forget that they’re actually making music, rather than just showing off,” says Kjellson. “You have to make songs. Rush is probably the most complex band in history and very ear-candy-oriented at the same time, I saw them two years ago in Stockholm and it was fucking brilliant, fucking amazing. I was so good that I barely enjoyed it.”
By no means is the bassist totally hung up on the past. “We have a lot in common with Darkthrone,” he says, “especially when it comes to giving the music industry the finger. Also, some people compare us to Opeth, which I can understand. They’re a great band. But we started very differently. They came from the Gothenburg death metal scene, we came from the Norwegian extreme metal scene. There was a huge distance in the beginning, but we’ve been inspired by a lot of the same bands over the past six or seven years. Who knows? Maybe in 20 years, we’ll sound exactly the same.”
