After After

When you spin a solo platter by the frontman of the sadly defunct Emperor, the greatest black metal band in the history of extra majestic left hand pathing, you pretty much know what you're getting: a darkly stellar trajectory. But After is more than simply the next step in his musical expression, the distillation of influences and inventions. This is a whole other staircase.

Jilting, tumbling, scraped-knee riffs elaborate the irregular, the perverse, The Barren Lands presenting itself, introducing the axiom of isolation; urban, rural, internal, external, no matter. It's tangible, bro. Anger, so often that first strata, finds solace in A Grave Inversed, a feral battering ram in Emperor mode, radical spit speech, lunatic ferocity swimming in a carnival tide, washed over by a piercing, nigh atonal saxophone pre-/post-tastefully warm solo before the reprise of Wagnerian sacrifice.

A serene, looking-out-the-window gait carries the title track, apocalyptic in sentiment, resigned in form, but therein lies its diabolical alchemy. It's never the bomb, but the fallout that kills everything. Galloping, fifth horseman abstraction strikes, strikes, strikes, you pendulum strike! Solitude, unlike all else, cannot be destroyed and Frozen Lakes On Mars crack open to burn mountebanks away by a cauldron of guitars that seamlessly mesh his black metal roots and the ever more progressive palette that daubed the final two Emperor albums.

Après et lentement, an architectonic Undercurrent courses beneath ten-minute flesh, sax chords dripping over strings to slip and weave; everything:the world in what web-like subtlely before determined, periodic explosions, these lava bubbles lacerating serenity until the cold locks the river in place, this first of a thematic diptych.

Abstemious beauty 'til turbid rumblings, Austere filaments loom a self-composed gloss and one can only marvel at the aural collage, a secluded gouache that demands exploration. Ground-up Maiden dust transports an Elysian riff to churn precipitate off Heaven's Black Sea, key and sax notes two of the thousand drops sculpting wraiths out of the tremulous yet propulsive waters, human strength and weakness sonically codified.

The second panel at last, we witness the ouroboros crawling On the Shores from Mahlerian sea drift to carve its place, rhythmwork and sax lines twining their vines twixt tail and head -- let me play that bit at five minutes once more -- a wordless ululation speaking the world before devouring itself. Isolated.

Kitchen sinking classic heavy; venomous black; progressive inflections; jazz; haunting single-note measures, the culminating stew is visceral, organic. Some albums work as background noise, others are highly praised, but only the very few transmute into an alien set of erythrocytes carrying, stimulating something as vital as personal thought and emotion. They become part of you, and this is one of those albums. A demanding masterwork.