Review Summary: This album encapsulates an essential world-weariness, misanthropic spirit and also a spontaneous bleakness and majestic sinister vibe that is the “Holy” (or shall we say “Unholy”?!) Grail of BM.
It is a well-known fact that Peter Tagtgren, deeply influenced by American Death Metal scene, created the legendary band Hypocrisy while bringing in some of the components of Sweden DM into the mix. Hypocrisy evolved to a unique beast of its own and in my opinion the apex of Swedish DM.
What Akhenaten (Andrew Harris), with the legendary Judas Iscariot, did to USBM may be regarded as a sort of counterpoint to Tagtgren’s maneuver in another sub genre of metal: Heavily influenced by mostly Norwegian gods of the second wave of Black Metal, while retaining the best elements of USBM, he also managed to give birth to a unique entity which evolved to, from my viewpoint, the greatest American BM band.
It seems that Akhenaten was trying to attain a two-fold equilibrium: between the elements of USBM and those of European – mostly Norwegian – BM; and also between the aggressive fast raw and the slower atmospheric BM. After all, Norwegian BM seems to have the upper hand and it is surely understandable, as JI was formed in 1992, during the most glorious days of Norwegian BM and as a whole BM itself, when the gods of the second wave of BM were one by one releasing their greatest masterpieces.
In addition to that, European BM framework seemed to be more suitable for reflecting his philosophical worldview which was deeply influenced by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Blake and most of all Nihilism.
“Heaven in Flames” in its raw more aggressive parts mostly reminds one of “Transylvanian Hunger” era DarkThrone’s minimalist stripped-down approach shaped around cold atonal melodies riding on relentless hypnotic blasting drums. In the slower more atmospheric parts, more straightforward melodies around repetitive tremolo riffs define the basic structure of songs a la Graveland’s later Viking/Pagan Black Metal works – “Thousand Swords” onward.
Please don’t get me wrong. “Heaven in Flames” is not a derivative work at all. Far from it. After all, it stands on its own feet as a JI album with a distinct sound and style which is immediately identifiable by fans of this great band.
Especially in longer songs of “Heaven in Flames”, mood sometimes changes within the space of one song, through change of rhythm and/or melodies which may change the dominant mood of the song. The general mood of the album fluctuates on a range including anger, hate, despair, introspection, etc. Akhenaten’s harsh rasping vocals is angrier and more hateful than ever before, as the album itself is darker than JI’s former and maybe even later works.
“Heaven in Flames” is a paradoxical album and to me, a great deal of its persistent magic rises from this very fact. It is very hateful and angry and simultaneously very melancholic and mournful, very dark ad raw but in the meantime more melodic and more accessible than JI’s other works. This enchanting paradoxical nature also shows itself in some of the songs in certain ways. For example, the first song, “An Eternal Kingdom of Fire”, starts as a fast raw blasting one, but the main riff is totally mournful and sad. This transition between mostly sadness/pain and anger/hate takes place a few times throughout the song (and some other songs) also via the change of tempo or Akhenaten’s vocals. For example in the mid-tempo and musically much more restrained “Eternal Bliss… Eternal Death” the unexpectedly hateful and blasphemous lyrics shape the paradoxical nature of the song.
This ravishing mix of melancholia and anger, manifested through an essential world-weariness and misanthropic spirit which is the quintessence of genuine BM, has always been the greatest appeal of BM to me. Fortunately, great bands like Drudkh and Primordial still represent this quintessential quality in most of their works.
The moods and emotions in “Heaven in Flames” never feel forced, because this album also encapsulates the spontaneous bleakness and majestic sinister vibe which define the greatest works of BM such as De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, Drawing Down the Moon, Ablaze in the Northern Sky, In the Night side Eclipse, Burzum’s earlier works, etc. That is the “Holy” (or shall we say “Unholy”?!) Grail of BM which too many bands have been desperately struggling for since then – most of them in vain. A lot of them have attempted to deliberately create or rather fake this vibe but it never works this way, because its main source is the psyche of the artist.
Some rare artists’ works gradually turn to an instrumental irreplaceable part of your life and your soul in a very exacting way. Therefore, their absence may leave a void in your life and your soul which could never be filled. To me, Akhenaten’s untimely and implausible retirement from music scene in 2003 has surely been a smashing experience of this type. And the irritating resulting void is still here inside me after twenty years; still empty, still unfilled.
