Much like Tigger, the funny old thing about genres is genres are funny old things. They don’t really mean that much in and of themselves. Like nicknames at school, you can have them thrust upon you without consent (just ask Andrew Eldritch if the Sisters Of Mercy are a goth band — sorry, mate, you don’t get to choose), and it doesn’t really matter anyway, because the only people they really serve are PR folk and record shop browsers, and these days there are far more of the former than there are of the latter.
Anyhoo, all of this is merely a preamble to discussing Maurice (Mories) “Gnaw Their Tongues” de Jong‘s latest project, Vetus Supulcrum, and the album Windswept Canyons Of Thule. Which is “dungeon synthwave”. Which basically means “you know that kinda stuff like what Mortiis used to do that makes you feel like you’re playing Castlevania”, but nobody’s got the time to put that on a divider on the record racks.
But, joking aside, let’s put joking aside. Because Mories still knows how to bring the darkness and evil even when he’s not doing the black metal or noise thing. Far less abrasive than GTT, Windswept Canyons Of Thule is probably best summed up by the word “ominous”, though “martial” and “bleak” show up too. At times reminiscent of Will, or In The Nursery at their Wagnerian best, it’s cloaked figures on horseback riding towards the camera, or immense gates being thrown open. It’s cities being reduced to dust and blood. It’s the caskets of the dead being lowered into the ground, and the little fuckers clawing their way out of them after everyone’s gone to the bereaved’s house for tea and triangular sandwiches. It is also, like pretty much all metal and metal adjacent music, a little silly and nerdy. Track titles include “Lord Werewolf Howls For War” and “Call Of The Nazgul”. But the trick is now, as it has always been, to stride the line between, as Spinal Tap would have it, “clever and stupid”, or more to the point, to style it out with conviction. Mortiis, lest we forget, dressed as a pixie and was still an alumnus of the feared Black Metal Inner Circle (or “naughty Tolkien goths” for short). And Mories isn’t lacking in that. Despite the inherent pitfalls, this is genuinely spooky and stirring music. Fuck, it makes me want to go out and spill a dragon’s pint, and I’ve only had three hours’ sleep.“Soundtracks for films that haven’t been made” is a total cliché at this point, yet I can’t help thinking that the movie for which this would be perfect would require a far bigger budget than anyone’s likely to splash out on a horrific mediaeval epic at this point in time, and crowd scenes that would basically lead to Covid transmission on a ludicrous scale.
In the meantime, bang it on your headphones, walk around a graveyard in the rain, and just hope nobody notices that you’re pretending to be a vampire.-Justin Farrington-
