Origin

 Norway’s treasure chest of musical heritage has, with Borknagar, who have kept churning out utterly incomparable albums since 1996, records whose many layers and sonic variety defy any easy categorization, gained one more jewel. Last year the Norwegian oddballs decided to put out an album that, besides acoustic music, would carry a strong message of attachment to one’s roots. Through the lyrics and melodies unfolds a picture of a journey through the present, heavily seasoned with folk and classical music, one that could never have been what it is had it not first been soaked through and saturated with the wisdom and aesthetics of the past. Main songwriter Øystein G. Brun has always chiseled the band’s avant-garde expression and post – black metal magic with the help of acoustics, but this album, by staying strictly and consistently acoustic, keeps an organic, primal feel.

How that works in practice becomes clear on the very first listen to Origin, where, despite the metal cover, you get hit by the ancient touch of the track ‘Earth Imagery’. Acoustic guitar and flutes conjure up an almost medieval, dreamy, misty landscape. A cold wind blows between the crowns of December-bare trees. Vintersorg’s vocals split into multiple layers and, with the occasional harmonies, call to mind Opeth’s acoustic treat, the album Damnation. Questions of existence and the unmistakable synergy between man and nature – despite man’s efforts to tear himself away from nature, which gave him actually little, but still enough, that he could start claiming it and reshaping it after his own visions, and subject it entirely to himself. The red thread that inspires can really be read just like naturalist poetry, while the band philosophically sings its epic to the universe and to man’s place within it.

‘Grains’ brings man back to his origins. The warnings about our unnatural states and actions continue, and in this resistance to the natural lies the reason for our stagnation and our enslavement to eternal rebellion. The redefining approach that Øystein has upheld as the maxim of his writing ever since Borknagar’s breakthrough debut in 1996 shows that the black metal veterans have finally got their vocals sorted this time. Earlier the mic was passed around: first Garm (now of Arcturus and Ulver), then he was replaced by current Dimmu Borgir man ICS Vortex, who used to go by the name Simen Hestnæs. In 2001 they found the right recipe and settled on the crystal-clear voice of the talented Vintersorg, who had until then been honing his craft in his own bands Vintersorg and Fission. His talent and inclination toward melodic harmonies and experiments give Origin the chance to carry off a sonic cacophony of aesthetics and magic, nicely consistent from start to finish. The drum work of Asgeir Mickelson, who previously pounded the skins in Spiral Architects and Insahn, dramatically ties the otherwise rather fragile, dreamlike flow of melody into a rhythmic whole. No overdoing it, no waffling. You’ll undoubtedly be floored by the keyboard contribution of Lars A. Nedland, who abuses the keys to the point where you start believing it’s really a constantly interweaving string arrangement with Hammonds, organs and traditional flutes. The landscape is conjured. And the end result is even heavier than if you’d been buried under a salvo of distortion and screaming vocals. ‘Oceans Rise’ summons the tides of a relentlessly rising sea, whipping the stony shores of Norwegian fjords. And this time it’s an older creation, from 1988, when they were chiseling out the album The Archaic Course.

The lighter-sounding, acoustically simpler short interlude of ‘Sings’ is complemented by the darker and more ominous tempo of ‘White’. The orchestration is rich and cinematic. Borknagar sound like a crystal-clear acoustic version of Dimmu Borgir. Except there’s no room here for forced satanizing. Borknagar are more worshippers of Mother Nature. The feeling creeps into your mind that you could get by without electricity altogether. Just with a kerosene lamp and the baroque sound of playful lutes, guitars, flutes and goblets full of mead, and a fire crackling in the fireplace.

‘Cynosure’ is a title you could recently hear on the inspired debut by Father, but Borknagar approach the theme in a much more troubadour-like way. The flute adds that dimension without which the sense of sublimity wouldn’t be the same. Credit for that undoubtedly goes to Norwegian flute icon Steinar Ofsdal, who contributed all the flute recordings for the album.

‘The Human Nature’ returns meditatively to themes already covered at the start of the record. Honestly, the second half is missing some kind of conceptual breakthrough that would take the internal evolution one step further. So the second half of this otherwise excellent, slightly over half-hour odyssey of sound and good taste starts to feel almost a bit too draining to take in one go. Everything starts to sound the same, or at least similar. ‘Acclimation’ then turns once more to man, who is not a symbiotic creature but a virus of destruction. We slam into the sphere of the sacred like wind against glass windows and want to break in even deeper than we have so far. The final frontier of the world hasn’t fallen yet. Evolution prolongs the agony. And this world will be followed by space. But this time the quartet’s eyes are set much lower – on this-worldly antiquity and the motifs of man’s archaic wrestling with himself and with nature.

The album’s grand finale goes to ‘The Spirit Of Nature’, which bids the listener farewell in the style of the album’s overture. Repetition is, after all, the mother of wisdom. And it’s precisely in the almost too crystalline, whitewashed Borknagar landscape that you forget about time and space and all the burning issues that conscious ecologists weave into a tangle of contemplation and melody. This time we’re rocked by a melody that sings a last hymn of praise to Nature and fades out in the perfect minimalism of patterns and textures. Origin closes in a masterfully executed suspension of everything superfluous. The current flows on. The stream of thought keeps building even after the last tremors of pompous musicality fall silent in the speakers.

Borknagar were without doubt a surprise for me, as for any totally random listener. After the first shock I dug into the whole discography and soon realized that with Borknagar you can’t draw a common thread between any of the seven jewels in their catalog so far. This is evolution. This is passion and knowledge and the philosophical stance of mature men. It’s a path reminiscent of the sturdy trajectories of Ulver, Green Carnation or my personal favorites, Opeth. All of them have made their own kind of climb closer to enlightenment and get nearer the goal with every album, while you just yearn for them to soon serve up something to satisfy that insatiable hunger for more. Verdict: in my own archaic, un-roaring way, calm as it is, I decide that this album could count among the more precious pearls of my collection – big thumbs up!