With their final album, Hate Forest reached a culmination of their musical ideology, allowing their characteristic theme -the arbitration of technological 'progress' vs. nostalgic atavism in terms of a sublime and mythic war of the heart- to come to light clearly in the operations of their medium. 'Sorrow' vaults over the stumbling block of most black metal protocol by eschewing metaphor as the sole vehicle for meaning, utilizing additionally functions of form, song structure, recording and editing to deliver a frigid, bleak soundtrack to the conflict. More impressive is 'Sorrow's refusal to adhere to the dialectical model, instead allowing the two conflicting ideologies to remain intact, un-synthesized, unresolved and eternally furious.
The vocal here is an abyssal bark from the pit, the dark recesses of oblivion. It's like a rottweiler tearing a carcass, slowed wayyy down. It's most poignant in it's absolute coldness - no emotion, little humanity.. just hollowness and audible deathatred. The guitar, bass and drum are linked by metronomic bindings, they work in unison as if one instrument. It's a churning and relentless tremolo, with sustained passages of distant and cold progressions, alternating with upending washes of warmth - breaks in the clouds. The sound is of low-tech machinery, like an old diesel truck engine, the diabolical sound the factory, of encroaching industry- the reactionary grief of Hate Forest. In this reaction, the central theme of 'Sorrow' is established.
Songs are almost minimalist exercises in their dismissal of beginnings and endings altogether. There is no fanfare.. no buildup, no epilogue, just a series of operations brought to form by objective logic. Songs begin as they end, clipped in post-production, opting out of the organic process of the function of the instruments to begin and cease playing. There is a mathematical logic to the song progression- a series of variables is established, set into motion and played out to completion- an icily inorganic and removed methodology, 'Sorrow' behaves as a machine in this way, or more specifically, a program.
Here Hate Forest transcends black metal by embodying ideas rather than illustrating them. In their personification of extreme removal and inhumanity, the concepts of nature, nostalgia & nationalism are counterpoised against a reified form; a central antagonism perfectly analogous to real life, where these concepts remain mental constructs, augmented by a longing and wishfully atavistic ethos and fortified against the crushing realities of progress. The historical struggle of Modernism is here played out in blunt, raw and brutal terms.
Sample:
Hate Forest : Sorrow (Full Album)
