Review Summary: A documentation of Runhild Gammelsaeter's first failure - or an evaluation of her beginnings as a solo artist.
After establishing herself as a force to be reckoned within the drone metal scene with Thorr's Hammer's
Dommedagsnatt and after expanding her reputation by teaming up with James Plotkin for Khlyst's
Chaos Is My Name, Runhild Gammelsæter took a stab at creating a solo repertoire. In 2008, she began with
Amplicon, which revealed a side of herself that many of her fans had not even hinted at, but it stayed true to her established sounds by continuing over a decade's worth of her vocals and signature style. That's to say her throaty howl was still intact and she was again off to display a piece of quirky metal pie – except, she was alone with her passion for biology and her upsetting mash-up of polar genres. And needless to say it didn't work so well for her.
One of the reasons as to why she got off to a rough start in this new field is that, contextually,
Amplicon was incredibly hard to get into on a specific level, as it rarely stretched outside of the barriers of specific biological finds and the connections they've had to her outside world. Unless you approach lyrical matters in a very broad sense – in which case you'll still be underwhelmed because you'll have only learned about her equally as broad passion – then there was an insanely trivial amount of information to get out of her 2008 solo debut. And unfortunately it translated into her music. She rushed through tracks as though she was bored or unsure of herself and what she was writing about – and unfortunately it broke out of the “endearing” sort of insecurity, which can be compared to “opening-night jitters” and into the mold of obnoxious and measly. Most heavily affected were her sedate acoustic passages, which stumbled awkwardly around as though by doing so they were automatically atmospheric, but really they were just languid and lifeless.
On an almost equally disgraceful note, Gammelsæter's rasp was, as previously stated, still used, but by no means was it used well. Her phrasing bounced around in and out of rhythm and it caused her meter to stumble; and instead of her previously confident and roaring timbre, she was severely lacking that vigor that she used so well on
Chaos Is My Name and even on Sunn O)))'s
White1. When she applied this technique (almost exclusively on the decidedly drone metal parts), her voice crackled over and over, and again, it's not humble, just obnoxious – lifeless, too. Her croon on the other hand failed for other reasons, one of the most notable being its lack of variety and how inappropriate its placement was. That, and it was obnoxious – and lifeless. Even her attempts at injecting her sound with harsh walls of feedback and noise went unnoticed, as her sound was relatively boring due to how poorly she translated her passions for science into music. Realize that I can't reiterate enough how poor this translation was and how much it affected the content displayed here. Folksy bits were not only unnecessary, but they were poorly executed; her drone metal attributes were sub-par, not only in the context of her back catalog, but in the context of the genre as a whole; and it was a rather awkward and “plastic” affair. By that, I mean that instead of having any emotional depth Gammelsæter began her solo portfolio on an odd step, which can only be seen as a blemish on her career due to it being tedious, emotionless and an example of compositional mediocrity.
