The first song on this debut LP from Devil With No Name is called “Grand Western Apostasy,” and singer Andrew Markuszewski menacingly croaks, “There’s no greater place for apostasy than here in the West / No surrender, no need for deliverance.” You may wonder what version of the West the band has in mind, and what makes it such a suitable spot for high-stakes renunciations. The socio-cultural West? The western hemisphere? Reno? As the band’s name suggests, Devil With No Name play black metal, a fact that points to a correspondingly “grand” notion of “The West”: source of modernity, monotheisms, the liberal tradition — all the stuff that black metal generally wants to reject, resist and burn to the ground.
But if you listen further, a setting begins to cohere. Over muscular riffs, Markuszewski (who also provides the guitars) sings, “Borderless light / The Devil’s whisper into the cosmos / Heavenly void come to me / Your eternal desert doth nourish me.” A desert? A borderless place? Maybe those are metaphors, iterations of the “void” that metal bands are much given to romance. But he also notes, “Emitting from the tree that creaks / The wind that bellows […] / The bullet that brings your final stare.” It all evokes the American southwest, site of forbidding landscapes and a good deal of gunplay — the mythic sort fired by cowboys ahorse, and the more recent cross-border violence accompanying criminal cartels’ competitions for drug-market dominance. And what about that band name? Is it a nod toward “The Man with No Name,” the anti-heroic figure Clint Eastwood popularized in a few of Sergio Leone’s best known Spaghetti Westerns?
That seems to be the idea. Markuszewski also plays in Chicago sludge band Lord Mantis, and drummer Cody Stein is a member of Oakland’s underappreciated Void Omnia. Despite those home locales, Devil With No Name espouses a thematic focus on the Sonora Desert, its environmental extremities and austere beauty. It’s not the first geographic domain one might associate with black metal, which tends to default in the mass cultural imaginary to the frigid, sylvan scenes of the Scandinavian wild. But it’s certainly the case that you can’t get much further west than the Sonora. And the various kinds of violence that have marred the desert’s landscape are marked by the excesses of Western modernity: rapacious capital accumulation, perverse appetites for power, cruel disregard for the value of individual life. Narcotics trade, children in cages, the hyperbolic swagger of men with guns (on either side of the “law”) — evil pervades the Sonora.
The record has some good songs, to be sure — vigorous compositions, driving riffs, skilled playing. But nothing in the music attempts to capture the specificities of the Sonora. And true to black metal’s dominant ethos, the songs seem largely to lionize the evils they document, presenting them as signs of Satan’s presence. Again, that may be metaphor: a lawless zone like the Sonora is an appropriate place to declare oneself apostate, and thus outside of the dictates of numerous articulations of law. But that doesn’t neutralize the cruelties and cynicism of the ongoing acts of evil that fill the desert with suffering. Perhaps that’s the point. If so, the band should make its intents a bit more explicable. Are the record’s excitements implicated in the violence they thematize? Or is there an embedded critique? In some cases, it’s important to be on the right side of the borderline.
Yeondoo Yung joins Habitat Project with an interesting serial project about housing, family and identity in Seoul, South Korea.
Look at the photographs and read the interesting text written by Julian Ott on Habitat Project Website.
http://tinyurl.com/evergreentower
