Review Summary: And so she marches on.
Black metal is not a genre of metal I find myself craving daily. My first experience with the genre was the song “Dunkelheit” by Burzum, shown to me by a friend I’ve long since stopped talking to. The intentionally harsh production was initially good for a laugh, but its use as a textural element quickly wore out its welcome. Varg’s gross, upper-register shriek also rapidly became grating, and the fact that it sounded like it was recorded on a pilot headset (which for all I know it might have been) did it no favors. The killing blow, however, was overall structure of the song, being seven minutes of exactly two repeating riffs and one repeating verse. When I stopped talking to this aforementioned friend, I just resolved to not listen to any black metal because, well, it probably all sounds at least a little bit like that. Burzum being cited as one of the most influential acts in black metal made that assumption that much easier.
Eventually, though, certain acts started to convince me, helped along immensely by production jobs that were less Fisher-Price and songwriting that had more than three chords. Dimmu Borgir was the first, with the melodeath-tinged jaunts of
Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia. Harakiri For the Sky was the second, after being recommended the song “Sing For the Damage We’ve Done” by a friend. Soon, I was running a stream of black metal through the pan sieve, searching for whatever gold nuggets I could catch.
Schammasch is the most recent gold nugget, but considering the quality of
Hearts of No Light, calling them gold almost feels reductive.
My first compliment to this album is at once an addressing of my primary issue with black metal: the horrific, grainy, thin production I was fearing is nowhere to be found. In its place is… well, one of the greatest production jobs I’ve heard on a metal record. There’s no easy way to say that, so I’m just gonna throw it in the middle of this paragraph and not worry about it. The guitar tones are warm but clear, with adequate top-end sizzle giving them the perfect amount of clarity without drowning out anything else. At moments, you can hear the squeaks of the plectrums on the strings. The bass sounds somewhat treble-oriented to my ears, and it sits perfectly audibly and separate from the guitars with ample growl and texture. And the drums,
oh my good god the drums. Good headphones, speakers, or IEMs allow you to hear the layout of the drum kit down to each individual piece. The cymbals are clear and controlled without sounding dry (the ride in particular is very crisp) and the wash of reverb the entire album is drenched in gives a sense of enormous scope to every stick impact. On that note, the reverb is gorgeous, occasionally toeing the line of “too much” but never daring to obscure detail.
My second compliment to this album is the impeccable sense of flow and dynamism it has. Songs will often incorporate multiple soaring, movie-soundtrack level climaxes, often drawing out buildups for two minutes or more and somehow managing to keep the length from feeling unnecessary. Tracks gracefully segue from one to the next, with the first three tracks in particular slipping by in almost hypnotic fashion. Additionally, and perhaps most impressively, not a single one of these shifts in tone or intensity feel shoehorned. It all sounds natural and calculated.
Schammasch’s relentless experimentation and boundary-pushing extends to the song structures, as well, with nearly every track on the album passing five minutes in length and featuring extensive use of piano, horns, choir, and strange samples to create unique soundscapes and atmospheres that keep Schammasch from sitting firmly within one genre. They’re full black-metal for the majority of “I Burn Within You,” and then on “A Paradigm of Beauty” sound downright
goth-rock.
"Katabasis" is relatively straightforward with its riffs and blastbeats, but then it slips into the fifteen-minute instrumental outro of "Innermost, Lowermost Abyss," packed full of electronic percussion, dreamlike guitar work, sampled strings, and closing with an ascending wall of distorted noise. And through all four of those songs, the flow is completely unbroken.
Listening to this album is a journey. It visits more sonic locales than any other black metal album I’ve heard, and incorporates its genre-blending so effortlessly that Schammasch have created something iconic. Yes, it’s clearly and definitively black metal, but there’s so much artistry and passion woven into every individual note and so much experimentation that the constraints of the genre are being bent near to the point of snapping.
I am excited for Schammasch to break them.
Essential tracks:
Winds That Pierce the Silence
Ego Sum Omega
I Burn Within You
A Paradigm of Beauty
I feel the same way about black metal but I've found my own little niche in it that I really enjoy a lot. 
