Sometimes it's really a wonderful thing when an album essentially tells you every last thing you need to know. Playing an undeniably depressive, slow-stab-to-the-heart sort of black metal, this (of course) one-man project hearkens of course back to Burzum but ends up sounding like something decidedly more continental, drawing comparisons to acts like Trist or Evilfeast to a larger degree than Filosofem or Hvis lyset tar oss. Indeed, the nooses that hang limply from the band's logo imply a more personal approach to emotions, dealing with them directly as has been in vogue for years now, rather than addressing these emotions as symptoms of something external, such as the lamentable changing of the world toward something that offends that powerful force of romantic longing for simpler times past.
The gamble with this shift in focus is that one can no longer rely on moments of sad, decadent beauty as ornaments adorning some more complex creature made up of bits of anger, hatred, aggression and pride. Instead, the hopeless melancholy becomes the primary, even sole, ingredient and thus the music must reflect this with 100% clarity 100% of the time, else fail in its vision. No small feat, as evidenced by the legions of bands playing in a similar style who tend to drag their feet through wholly uninteresting chord progressions and tremolo lines that fail to accomplish what this record fortunately manages to pull off quite convincingly.
You bet your ass there's a lot of repetition and simplicity on this album. There are only a handful of riffs per song, and most of these are no more than two notes or chords that bob up and down in an ocean of eternal depression. It's easy enough to write off those simple minor chords as being cheap gimmicks, but there's no denying that they're somehow attuned to the emotional core of our brains. In riffs like these, two chords is all you need: one to progress forward, sound bright and perhaps even hopeful, then the minor chord in tow, inevitably knocking your soul back down into that inescapable hole of despair. This simple, endlessly repeatable pattern , always resolving to the most miserable, woe-drenched emotions it's possible to imagine, so perfectly mimics the ebb and flow of the tides of one's own personal experience that it's no wonder at all that such musical techniques have been refined to such a formula. Sometimes echoes of a more traditional, tremolo-melody mode of Norse expression can be heard, through the lens of more recent practitioners such as those innumerable Finnish artisans of melody.
Adversus Semita adorn their downtrodden two-chord sadguy riffs with exactly perfect embellishments. Howling, distant and reverbed wailings are pure pain (and, even at their most tortured, never do that often poorly executed high-pitched scream-cry banshee thing that vocalists in these sorts of bands are often wont to do). Drums plod along with simple timekeeping rock beats or double bass rolls, sometimes blasting away during the more vitriolic expressions of fury-fueled anguish, cymbals often barely audible in the storm of fuzz, but the performance and production renders even these into a pure organic expression of despair. The haze of fuzz spread across the whole affair also does wonderful things to the conservatively-used keyboards, which shine especially in a three-note pattern that repeats at the end of the simple riff cycles in the main theme of the first track. In fact, I do wish the keys were used just a touch more often as they're often relegated to the more ambient transitional sections of the album once the majesty of the opening song has passed.
You either revel in this sort of stuff, or you don't. That's all there really is to it. If you can wallow in self-perpetuating misery like I can, there's tons to adore about this album. If you're of the school of thought that the more depressive disciples of Burzum have misunderstood his intent and are misguided in their self-loathing dirges, nothing about Hopeless Melancholy is going to change your mind. But for us sad guys, this is pretty potent stuff indeed.
Sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv6hICZHSNc&t=794s
