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| Anomie |
But maybe, I'm wrong about that. In fact, it's got to be certain that I'm incorrect.
Let's head backwards in time and explore the depths of my personal folly and how I could have been saved by my own hands.
Curtis Dewar of Dewar PR, who knows I'm a big vinyl nut, sent me a message saying that I'd better jump on Violet Cold's latest album before the preorders take them all.
Being perpetually behind in my emails, Anomie hadn't gotten a listen yet. At that point, it was relaxing time, beer thirty, and just general off the clockedness of what might have been the weekend.
But, being a semi-pro-rock-bloggo-journo, Dewar's opinion deserved some due diligence. The fact that we were some time away from payday didn't matter. I pulled up the email on my iPhone and listened to a goodly chunk of the first track.
Whatever in the world Dewar was talking about had gone well, well over my head. There was absolutely nothing in this album that interested me more than a passing listen. It certainly didn't have anything special that made me want to even review it, much less purchase it on pre-order.
Obviously something changed and what that was...escapes me now. This story is a bit old and it's hard to tell you exactly what happened and what led us here.
But however the tale is told and regardless of it's proximity to the truth, today, I sit before you, Tridroid Records (but mostly tapes), Curtis Dewar, and most importantly, Violet Cold prostrate and prone.
What is the root cause of this?
I wrote this record off without truly feeling it. A journalist said once that his rule for reviewing a record, in terms of how many times to listen to it before writing, was as many times as it takes to get what the artist is going for.
In this case, not even a single track was heard by this blogger. This was a massive failure that was brought on by and overloading of content. As a grade F nobody in the world, my inbox still explodes like a carpet bombing.
The beginning of this record, is in truth, a terrible lie. It's a beautiful and emotive track encased in a skin of bland black metal.
This is a baiting of the trap. With the stigma going around about black metal, and not at all unearned, this album would turn off listeners of BLACK MOTHERFVKING KVLT METVL!
Why? Because it's arrestingly beautiful.
In the common tongue, writers will talk about who a record straddles two fan bases. It's metal enough for the thrashers, but it's poppy enough for the rockers, This album though, takes a different approach.
It's too beautiful for fans of Second Wave Black Metal, but it's too Black Metal for people who aren't already into it.
Violet Cold slices away scores of fans of Black Metal while keeping rock fans away through sheer intimidation.
There are strings, pianos, and spoken word elements that took me away to other worlds. The main vocals though, straight up Mayhem, Dead Style.
Let's make sure to point out that Violet Cold is a one man project. In one man projects, the Foo Fighters' debut record notwithstanding, typically the drums are the part of the music to really suffer because, being a drummer is hard.
On Anomie, the drums follow the rest of the music in beautiful fashion. The times when there is ugliness, we're thrashed with blast beats and when the music is building, we get heavy, yet slightly funky drum lines. In a very odd twist of fate, the drums were my favorite part of this record.
The 53 minute record is pressed onto two thick slabs of vinyl and vinyl purchasers are entreated to a bonus track...that's nearly ten minutes long.
It has very basic packaging. There's no lyric sheet. It's just two meaty LPs in a matte sleeve adorned with a black and white photo of a woman in a mask.
What makes this extra special is that I can't even tell you what language the songs are sung in. The vocals are rough and angry and ruins any chance of them being intelligible. I think it's in English, but as the man himself is from Baku, Azerbaijan, it wouldn't surprise me if they weren't.
During an interview, I was once asked by the Swedish interview subject if not being able to understand the words is a turn off for Americans. For this reviewer, it's not because music is a universal language. If the song is emoting sadness, I'll pick that up even if the lyrics are in Swedish, Norwegian, Russian, or Chinese.
This is a case where I can't understand anything and it still moves me emotionally. There's nothing more than you can ask from a song than that.
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