Underjordiska — Dystert Vilse

Whether this can be traced back to self-professed misanthropy in the genre or just a sign of the times, Underjordiska is yet one many one-man black metal 'bands'.

A young Swede named Dawid Dahl is behind this group with two faces. On one hand a dreamy, ambient one (recently highlighted on a split-cd with Spectral Lore, where each delivers a lengthy ambient piece) and a uncompromising black metal one. Lo-fi isn't the word, because it's far from accidental, but that's definitely what the material on Dystert Vilse is thoughtfully modelled after. A menacing, solid wall of sound that in which the distorted vocals is one of the bricks that helps shunning all light. On first listen the sound appears rather cold and sterile, with a few spins this turns out to be an advantage. Another thing that particularly sick is the sheer out-of-tune dissonance, strings are slowly strangled to an effect that crawls and blisters under your skin. I can't recall any band doing this to that effect, only ones that just don't tune their instruments very well (like Mütiilation for instance), here—again—it's no accident but part of the plan of destruction and transcendence. Apart from all that eerie dissonance, there occasionally is room for a more melancholic approach, like in Isolation. The album's closer Hope even takes on epic proportions, at least until it derails magnificently.

Underjordiska creates a very thick wall of noise and it's definitely not material for folks into proper production values or such. People who dig the outer fringes of black metal, like Striborg, Wold, Darkspace or the gazillion other more obscure groups from around the world that are getting pumped unto storage servers via the many specialised blogs are likely to enjoy this.