When Myrkur landed on the scene in 2015 with her debut album M, a question arose about the legitimacy of a Pop artist producing Black Metal. M was a rough attempt at producing something in the vein of Ulver‘s Bergtatt, Atmospheric Black Metal and/or Post Black Metal. It managed that just fine if being a bit unremarkable otherwise. The elitist uproar about this album was intense and a bit ridiculous, as even if the album is bad or not, it did manage to do enough to be called Metal. As in answer to this, Myrkur decided to prove all the naysayers right by transitioning into Folk songs on her subsequent albums. As Spine arrives, this entire journey comes full circle: the new album is Pop marketed to metalheads. Before you Myrkur fans scoff; I say this without any judgment intended. It is my opinion that you should like what you like and be honest about it, after all I enjoy artists like Björk, Kate Bush, Meer and VOLA myself. Moving on from that question, we should focus on what is important here: is Spine any good? There is some metal instrumentation left on this album as you’ll occasionally hear a distorted guitar and double kick drums that you would not on a Pop album (see “Valkyriernas Sang”). The production most often does not agree that this is Metal however, and pushes the, frankly, lazy atmospheric instrumentation into a muffled background sound. Fast snare hits or not, the impact is not felt at all unlike what you might hear in a Sylvaine song.
The most interesting cut on Spine is probably “Mothlike”, that has a slight Synth Pop feel to it with Kate Bush-like vocals and a weirdly unfitting Heavy Metal solo that finishes the song off. The pop refrains are what rule this album, like the Florence + the Machine moment in “My Blood is Gold”, the later era-Leprous feel of the title track and the Beatles like piano in “Devil in the Detail”. “Blazing Sky” also has a refrain that I could swear I’ve heard before somewhere. While none of the content is offensively sloppy on Spine, much of it feels like unfinished sketches of songs. This might be due to the predominant Pop influence that demands succinct songs clashing with the Metal and Folk parts of the compositions. Unfortunately, I cannot say much more about this album as it echoes what Myrkur has been doing since after her debut, perhaps with a bit more honesty and clarity this time around. If she would want to produce music leaning more into her Pop experience successfully, this kind of experimentation is probably the way to go. The yield of songs this time is, however, as unremarkable as they have ever been.
