Olekranon — Bilal
The first time I played this album, I was in my car, and there was a decent amount of road noise around me at the time. I was greeted by a very emotional rhodes-ish keyboard riff with an urgent foreshadowing quality about it, accompanied by a gritty drum machine. "This is gonna be good", I thought to myself. A moment later my face contorted; the melodic, epic feeling music, which seemed to hint at some massive and exciting reality in which it could take place, had been replaced by a wall of cheaply distorted digital noise! I could still vaguely hear a blunt electronic beat plodding along without dynamic variation, but could discern little structure or tonality in the obnoxious trebley racket.
The second time I listened to the album, I used headphones, in a quieter environment, and it revealed itself to me. What had seemed to be white noise was actually something closer to a digitally distorted black metal guitar sound: a thin sound typical of underground black metal blended with influence from industrial rock. Knowing this, I could at last see the apocalyptic narrative of this first piece intact, though it still suffers from its lack of sonic clarity, especially during the all-out noise meltdown that happens at the end.
Huber has evidently listened to a lot of Nine Inch Nails, as the creeping cinematic builds of Reznor's instrumental pieces are ubiquitous here, and the gratuitously fuzzed out guitars play simplistic textural riffs of detuned and impressionistic chords. Unlike many of Reznor's imitators, Huber thanksfully draws more inspiration from his subtle dystopian sound design rather than his angsty lyrical content.
"Engels", the second piece, is more comfortable in its own skin as more straight-forward rhythmic noise, channeling the delayed echo chamber grooves of bands like The Peoples' Republic of Europe. Hearing this track, I start to feel Huber may understand the idea of tasteful distortion afterall, as he uses it to transform oddly beautiful and consonant ambient chord progressions into subtely tonal noise patterns. The determined urgency of the first track permeates this track as well, and it really feels as if that journey has been continued here.
"Brng Yvwh" is a driving number with a heavy, droning distorted bass guitar line over a straight ahead rock beat. The result is quite similar in tone, groove and dingey urban discontent to Helmet, a band that also uses hypnotic repetition of simple patterns. Huber milks the riff until the track ends in another noise-out sequence, where feedback drowns out both riff and rhythm.
Title track "Bilal" is a stylistic switch: full octane punk with incoherent distorted shouts and shrieks. It sounds a lot like the most raucous NIN songs, like "Big Man With a Gun". It works because the aggression is clearly real, it's overflowing with energy. The album as a whole keeps excitement high through concise structures, general intensity, and a feeling that each track builds to the next, an anticipatory sensation Olekranon's music shares with post rock.
Later in the album, there are some great tracks as well. Probably my favorite thing on the album, "Mouths Flame", creates a cataclysmic primordial landscape with a thumping mid-paced pulse and guitar feedback, sounding not unlike TenHornedBeast. Halfway through the song, the soundscape breaks down, and is replaced by a fluttering haze of theramin-esque tones and distorted synth loops.
Songs like "Daisycutter" bring increased levels of formidable black metal dread, but by this point in the disk, the muddled sound really starts to grate on me, in any listening environment. It's a good thing the album is fairly short. The first two minutes of "Master Swine" is the only break from it, a sparser minimalist passage with some nice crackling noise created by tapping the end of a guitar cable against a jack (I recognize the sound) over an understated four on the floor beat.
Conclusively, if you're a rabid fan of DIY bedroom projects and black metal as well as industrial rock and noisy, brooding rock bands like Sonic Youth, you may be able to unearth a hidden masterpiece within "Bilal". For everyone else, this rough hewn album is going to prove pretty unlistenable, if only due to the recording quality. Those looking for a pure noise fix will likely find it too conventionally structured, melodic and texturally thin. Those wanting to engage in an ominous, cinematic soundscape will be put off by the ever-present distortion on nearly every element in the mix, which on more than a few occasions seems to serve no purpose. Huber's compositional style is intelligent and powerful, the scope of his ideas vast, but he could serve his vision so much better with a cleaner, more varied production. There is no excuse, in this day of home studios and laptop musicians, for a recording to sound like this.