Style: Avant-garde metal, progressive metal, black metal (Mixed vocals, mostly clean)
Recommended for fans of: Ulver, Borknagar, Voivod, Thy Catafalque
Country: Norway
Release date: 22 April 2002
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of Kristoffer Rygg, aka Garm, to the world of black metal: even from his musical entrance on Ulver’s Bergtatt, he postured himself as a forward thinker, integrating black metal with folk sensibilities in a way never quite seen before. One year later, Garm and co. dropped Kveldssanger, one of the first renowned dark folk pieces (and a contender for my all-time favorite album), all before taking a radical left turn into ambient and synthwave. But before Garm’s fascination with electronics and ambience, he also contributed vocals to progressive black metal outfit Borknagar, a renowned Subway favorite, and spent some time in Arcturus, one of the most avant-garde of Garm’s groups and the subject of today’s Lost in Time. Today, we’re discussing The Sham Mirrors, Arcturus’s magnum opus and my introduction to avant-garde metal as a young metalhead.
Touches of weirdness were always present in Arcturus’s sound: though their debut Aspera Hiems Symfonia stays fairly true to its raw black metal aesthetic, tracks like “The Bodkin and the Quietus,” “Wintry Grey,” and “Raudt og Svart” introducing bizarre backing clean vocals and a glacial, ethereal songwriting style betray the quirkiness at the heart of their sound. However, Arcturus quickly sidestepped their grim and frostbitten aesthetic in place of something with a touch more sideshow: follow-up La Masquerade Infernale was an avant-garde album so theatrical and so dramatic that it bordered on camp, foregoing the black metal of Aspera and squeezing every last drop of juice out of its stranger moments.
But which direction to go when you’ve emptied the well of cabaret theatrics? On The Sham Mirrors, The only logical answer for Arcturus is “both ways,” re-introducing the black metal that permeated Aspera (even including a feature from Ihsahn on “Radical Cut”) and at the same time launching the infernal masquerade into the bleakness of space: whereas Pagan’s Mind’s Celestial Entrance is a grand tale of shimmering auroras, cosmic deities, and warriors, The Sham Mirrors is considerably more stark and hostile, exposing the listener to unforgiving coldness, bursts of stellar radiation, and the sharp, jagged surfaces of lifeless celestial bodies who have never felt the wind weather their crags. The Sham Mirrors is littered with astral imagery and spacey atmospherics, from the desperate lyrical transmissions from an apocalyptic distant planet on opener “Kinetic” to the twinkling keyboard breakdown on “Collapse Generation” and the delicate piano work leading into extended synthesizer ambience in the middle third of closer “For To End Yet Again,” giving the listener a brief moment of tranquility among its austerity.
This is not to say that The Sham Mirrors is an actively hostile experience – despite the extrasolar anguish that permeates its runtime, moments of triumph and even cinematic songwriting surface throughout. “Kinetic” offers a great example, immediately opening the album with huge chords from guitarist Knut Valle, active and trippy drumwork from Hellhammer, and one of the biggest riffs on the album. Switching back and forth between spoken-word transmissions and vocals that border on yodeling, the track builds into powerful drumming that culminates in a ferocious guitar solo before petering out with delicate piano interplaying with a soft vocal delivery. Following track “Nightmare Heaven” works in similar fashion to “Kinetic,” making a grand opening statement by pitting an oscillating guitar riff against pummeling drums before transitioning into a breakneck piano solo by Steinar Johnsen. The track disintegrates into electronic drum/synthesizer interplay, rebuilding itself into something more metallic and mounting in tension until frantic synthesizers underlie falsetto shouts from Garm.
A cornerstone of The Sham Mirrors’ songwriting is its ability to coalesce bizarre song structures and unconventional instrumentation in a way that exudes flow. In the hands of more amaetur songwriters, the use of a drum and bass breakdown or quasi-yodels in the middle of a metal song would spell instant failure, but Arcturus thrive and succeed in these moments, whether it be the breakdown from frantic symphonic black metal into what is effectively the ice cave music from Donkey Kong 64 on “Collapse Generation,” the sudden trailing guitar riff into a brooding ambient section on “Ad Absurdum,” or the slap in the face by “For to End Yet Again” when heavy guitars and over-compressed vocals suddenly overtake subdued-yet-twisted sideshow instrumentals. Despite its oddity and foregoing of convention, The Sham Mirrors feels effortlessly written, as if this kind of songwriting is standard fare on whatever planet Arcturus are from.
Arcturus are fully aware of the silliness and camp that The Sham Mirrors is borne from: despite its pervasive themes of otherworldly suffering and outer isolation, it never takes itself too seriously, making a point to absolutely take the piss out of the music with the most non-sequitur word salad lyricism to be found in their career. The desperate outcries on “Kinetic” in lines like “As return is no option / Our eyes were removed / For our own safety / The distance too great / For you to hear our cries” and the lamentations on “Ad Absurdum” of “I’m tired of telling stories / With this ghost voice of mine / So you can say you don’t / Believe in ghosts” sit alongside lines like “Police, police, police / Please stop the Euro / From binar, bin Laden / Io, paramount pan / Io, paradox pan“ from “For to End Yet Again,” a drastic change in tone from morose to incomprehensible. However, like the quirky instrumentation and the oxymoronic songwriting, The Sham Mirrors never showboats its silliness, sneaking its way into the lyrics only to be found by those who listen hard enough to go, “What the fuck did Garm just say?”
At the heart of The Sham Mirrors’ success is its paradoxical beauty: it manages to balance the tragic and the cinematic with the absurd; it is at times as theatrical and campy as its predecessor and at others is effortlessly cool and even takes the piss out of itself; and it paints harsh and unforgiving alien worlds in a way that is approachable and listenable. Even though The Sham Mirrors was likely just a stepping stone on Garm’s path through musical experimentation, as Garm moved on from Arcturus a long time ago, it had a considerable effect on me and sparked my interest in avant-garde metal. Even as a young listener, I recognized its merit as a cool and weird metal album and after nearly a decade and a half of spinning, I am intimately familiar with its quirks and consider The Sham Mirrors an essential avant-garde metal listen.
Recommended Tracks: Kinetic, Radical Cut, For to End Yet Again, Nightmare Heaven
You may also like: Fjoergyn, Unexpect, Malariii, Frore 5 Four, Dreamslain
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives page
Label: Ad Astra Enterprises
Arcturus is:
– Garm (vocals)
– Steiner Johnsen (keyboards)
– Knut Valle (guitars)
– Dag Gravem (bass)
– Hellhammer (drums)
