Thoughts on Myrkur's "Mareridt"

As a dedicated Myrkur apologist, the last few years have been a strange journey for me. Unlike Ghost Bath, I can't actually remember a time when I didn't know the woman behind Myrkur was Amalie Bruun, dismissed by some as a "Danish model and pop singer," but better known to fans of underground rap as the creepy falsetto on the hook of Vinnie Paz's "Nosebleed," released with R.A. the Rugged Man back in 2010. But ever since Myrkur was "outed" for the crime of having a life and job outside of black metal, she's been the most controversial figure in the entire genre. If you ask some of the regulars on r/blackmetal, she's a infiltrator and a hack, putting on black metal like a fake patch jacket at a photo shoot. If you ask the true believers, she's one of the most interesting and original musicians in the scene, integrating folk and post-rock in new and interesting ways. Her first album, M, wasn't very different from her excellent debut EP, and tended simply to reinforce already-existing perceptions: she was either a brilliant new artist or a corporate fake making derivative bubblegum black metal for the masses, depending on who you asked.

Then came Mareridt. Based on the singles, "Maneblot" and "Ulvinde," expectations were that Myrkur's second album would be a continuation of the ideas from her first: more folky and melodic, perhaps, but with roots in the black metal tradition nonetheless. That's not what we got.

If Myrkur's first two releases had a weakness, it was their lack of internal cohesion (a sense that the songs on the album could make just as much sense in any order) and related tendency towards musical non-sequiturs (folky songs that violently switched gears into aggressive black metal riffs, etc.) In Mareridt, Myrkur resolved these issues, but created another one in the process: by crafting songs within the songwriting and musical conventions of a single genre, Myrkur released what often feels like a compilation album. There are post-doom songs ("The Serpent," "Funeral"), dark folk songs ("Kaetteren," "Loven"), black metal songs ("Maneblot," "Elleskudt," "Ulvinde") gothic metal songs ("Gladiatrix"), and even a few alt-pop numbers ("Crown," "Death of Days," "Kvendilil"), but no sense of a concrete musical identity. Songs like "Elleskudt" and "Crown" simply don't belong on the same album; the former is a ripping folk metal track with blackened riffs, the latter is strangely evocative of the music of Lana Del Rey with a hint of Evanescence.

In fact, even on some of  the heavier numbers, I found myself comparing Myrkur's vocal performance with Amy Lee of Evanescence and Chibi of The Birthday Massacre, mainly because Myrkur made the very poor decision to perform many of the songs on Mareridt partially or wholly in English. Like it or not, manufactured mystique is part of black metal: one of the reasons people reacted so negatively to the revelation of Myrkur's identity was that a figure who is already famous outside of black metal can never cultivate the sense of mystery that swirls around figures like Wrest, Niklas Kvarforth, or Otrebor. Myrkur's use of her native Danish on her earlier albums gave listeners a sense of distance from the music that they couldn't get from her person. When she sings in English, that distance evaporates, leaving nothing but Amalie Bruun, a thirty-something from Copenhagen who really likes black metal and nordic folk.

It sounds like I'm criticizing Myrkur for being too much of a real person on Mareridt. I guess I am.

But I would be lying if I didn't also say that I was disappointed by the overall direction of Mareridt as well. Too many of the songs don't have anything in common with the beautiful union of nordic folk melodies and black metal frost that I loved in Myrkur's first extended play. "The Serpent" and "Funeral," for instance, are great Jex Thoth songs, but not really what I wanted or expected to hear from a new Myrkur album. "Kvindelil" and "Death of Days" are outtakes from a really cool Lana Del Rey album, but I'm not stitching a Lana Del Rey patch onto my jacket anytime soon.

I freely acknowledge that none of these complaints are faults with the music itself. All of the scooby-doom and alt-pop songs on Mareridt are well-written and have great atmosphere. The same is true of all the folk songs. In fact, there's only one track on the entire record I don't begrudgingly enjoy: Bornehjem, an interlude which features Myrkur giving a bizarre monologue about demons in a little girl's voice. Like much of the record, it feels like it got lost on its way to being on another album; unlike the rest of the record, that other album was probably trash.

Recommended, I guess.