Dødheimsgard have been around for a long time during which they have remained fairly unknown outside their niche due to a very hit or miss esoteric style. With Avant-garde leaning bands like this, the question is usually not whether they are weird but rather whether they are good. My first reaction to Black Medium Current was disbelief, not as a protest to its weirdness but to the fact that its building blocks are very simple, and at a glance ill fitting for a band billed as Avant-garde. This album mixes some early second wave Black Metal that could be at home on Transilvanian Hunger (though remember these guys are Norwegian and released their debut in 1995) with Classical music (even direct quotes) and Electronica. The band also slides neatly into a mode that exists somewhere between Progressive Rock and Jazz in the instrumentation side. Unlike the car crash that this description could evoke, the Black Metal melts into the other genres as if a demon possessing them. The secret ingredient that makes it all work is some surprisingly great bass playing and production: Black Medium Current is a very groove driven album that sinks its teeth in further with each spin. It ends up taking on an hypnotic aura that makes me think of a more chilled out Schammasch, high on space mushrooms and drifting out into zero gravity.
“Et Smelter” starts things off with directly quoting Beethoven‘s “Piano Sonata No.14” (popularly known as the “Moonlight Sonata”) before shifting through several genres and moods including Black Metal and Classical Piano and finishes off with a Rock solo and some slight Electronica. Album highlights “Interstellar Nexus” and “It Does Not Follow” impress with the former alternating between a Rock groove backed with electronic elements and breakdowns where the music turns sinister before finishing off by turning the Electronica as sinister as the rest. The latter couples a Progressive Rock bass groove with looping electronic sounds and Blackened Death Metal. The bass does for the sound, letting every element flow into each other, as most Black Metal bands opt to hide it in the lowest reaches of their basement. After an instrumental that recalls (or directly quotes?) Franz Liszt, the back half of the album veers into Doom filled moods and slows things down a notch. There are still some worthwhile ideas as the band starts playing with some Drone like elements and the Electronica stumbles into some Video Game Music like territory. “Den Tomme Kalde Mørke” even ends on a moment that sounds like a parody of a Florence and the Machine song. The back half has moments that do not always land and some parts could have been cut (see the last four minutes of “Abyss Perihelion Transit”). But going through Black Medium Current, I keep wanting to revisit it and the reason I am finding for doing so is that, like it’s album cover, it throws interesting yet disparate elements at the wall and creates something with an eerie symmetry between them.
