Good exposure for a band most people have never heard of.
By KELEFA SANNEH
Published: November 8, 2007
ALLENTOWN, Pa., Nov. 7 — On Tuesday night, in a plush tour bus parked in this city’s scruffy downtown, a couple of Norwegians were talking about world music. They were talking about the competing musical traditions of Norway and Sweden. They were talking about Icelandic linguistics and Viking mythology. They were talking about indigenous scenes in Canada, India and lots of places in between. In other words, they were talking about heavy metal.
The Norwegians were Ivar Bjornson and Grutle Kjellson, who founded their metal band, Enslaved, 16 years ago. They were once identified with the spooky — and, for a time, hugely controversial — subgenre known as black metal, but they have sloughed off one label after another while slowly building a worldwide following.
Not a huge one: They are rock stars, more or less, in Norway, but they are decidedly underground figures in most of the rest of the world. Still, that a hundred or so fans came out to see them at the Crocodile Rock Café, a cavernous Allentown club, says something about the tenacity of the genre and the band. The members hurtled through a typically eerie, riveting set, propelled by tricky rhythms, keyboard atmospherics, mutating guitar riffs and careful but cathartic explosions of noise and screaming.
This was the fourth date of a grueling five-week tour, and the unglamorous surroundings only underscored the mixed blessing of being in a band like this one. Being a working metal band often means touring the world indefinitely.
On a chilly night at the Crocodile Rock, that might not have seemed like good news to the band members. But it should be good news to adventurous listeners around the country, including those in New York: Thursday night the band is scheduled to play the B. B. King Blues Club & Grill. And you don’t have to be an expert in Scandinavian history — or even a metal fan, really — to enjoy getting lost in the group’s epic, elegant music.
Enslaved went from being called “black metal” to being called “Viking metal” to being called “progressive metal,” though the members prefer the catch-all term “extreme metal.” And in an Internet age especially, extreme metal both transcends national boundaries and, in a fertile way, emphasizes them. “Evil” imagery exists everywhere, inspiring scenes all over the globe. And as old-fashioned Satanic imagery has given way to subtler allusions to pre-Christian culture, obsessive fans have gotten used to doing online homework to keep up with the lyric sheets. If you like Enslaved, for example, you probably know that Mr. Kjellson used to sing in Icelandic because of that language’s similarity to Old Norse, and you may even know something about ancient runes.
Now Mr. Kjellson mainly sings in English, partly in an attempt to close the language gap with non-Norwegian fans, many of whom had been following the band’s evolving interests by reading the English translations included in some albums. Mr. Bjornson said the foreignness of English was a benefit too: “That dissonance helps, getting into character, removing ourselves from our daily lives.”
On the most recent Enslaved album — a great CD from 2006 called “Ruun” (Candlelight USA) — the English-language lyrics are more suggestive than bombastic. Hints of the old black-metal misanthropy remain (“I do not pity life/I follow not pathetic order”), but the mood is more melancholy than pugnacious. The title track, one of the highlights of Tuesday’s show, is a crashing paean to the old gods, building from a prog-rock introduction to a seething climax: “Reach for them, see them turn away.”
From listening to the latest CD, you might never guess that Enslaved was once associated with one of the most reviled music scenes of all time. In the early 1990s Norwegian black metal made headlines with a series of high-profile events: one musician’s suicide, a spate of church burnings and the conviction of two prominent figures — Faust of Emperor and Varg Vikernes of Burzum — for murder.
One of Enslaved’s first releases was a split album with Emperor, and Mr. Bjornson admits that the media storm helped draw attention to Norwegian black metal. “People still regard Norway with a certain respect,” he said. “Not only because of all the scary stuff that happened — well, ‘weird’ is a better word — but because of how the scene developed, on its own.” Then, having benefited from the controversy, many bands associated with black metal had to figure out a way to live it down.
Enslaved did it by persevering and by changing: The members view “Monumension,” an excellent and mysterious-sounding album from 2001, as the beginning of a new phase. And in Norway the members of Enslaved are settling into their unlikely roles as respected veterans. Oddly enough, the Norwegian Ministry of Culture and Church Affairs sponsored a collaboration between members of Enslaved and the noisy electronic duo Fe-mail. The hybrid group is called Trinacria (you can hear live tracks at myspace.com/trinacriamusic), and a full-length album is due next year. Extreme metal, which once seemed like a threat to Norway’s cultural heritage, is inevitably coming to be seen as part of it. How long before the government finances an ad campaign, inviting black-metal fans from around the world to come to the most evil country on Earth?
Certainly some sort of cultural exchange program seemed to be under way at the Crocodile Rock on Tuesday, where Mr. Kjellson kept saying, “You having a good time, Allentown?” Or, “Thank you, Allentown, Pennsylvania.” Or, “This is the last song for tonight, Allentown.”
Before long, the city name was starting to sound like a curse word, or maybe just a reminder that the life of a touring extreme-metal band is hard work. But Mr. Kjellson surely knows that the genre’s popularity in a handful of European countries is the exception, not the rule. Around the world metal endures — and, in its own subterranean way, flourishes — in nooks and crannies.
It was now early on Wednesday morning in empty downtown Allentown, and the small crowd in the big club remained. As the band prepared to play the savage title track from “Isa,” Mr. Kjellson said, “I guess most of you already know this one.” And he guessed right.
Enslaved will perform tonight at the B. B. King Blues Club & Grill, 237 West 42nd Street, Manhattan, (212) 997-4144; bbkingblues.com.
