It’s always struck me as interesting how labels like avant-garde stop being a descriptor of being on the edge and become a set established sound of their own within a genre. Take avant-garde black metal. At this point, it basically means moody, dramatic black metal with lots of keyboards or strings like that. Given that Smohalla‘s press release for Ruina Draconis came with lots of mentions of Arcturus and Ulver, it seemed a fairly safe bet that this was in similar vein. As such, assured that this would be a familiar example of the adventurous, I plucked Ruina Draconis out of the promo pile.
Smohalla do indeed sound like what I came for at first. Sinisterly elegant guitar leads strut over furious drum work. Frosty, brooding keyboards abound. There’s even a sense of rawness and grit to to songs like “Varon”, with its dissonant keys before hitting the listener with a black metal assault. Then the back half of that song heads into synthpop territory. The synthpop drifts by but it does signal that Ruina Draconis is about to spread its wings and get a bit weird. “Cantica Servi Sufferentis” combines the synthpop and black metal aspects before bringing a crushing post-metal section that is the perfect conclusion to the build up. “In Stagno Ignis Serpens Antiqus”, Smohalla takes those avant-garde synths and replicates the rhythms of doom metal with them before mutating into another of those frenzied black metal moments like we go on “Varon”, only here it hits harder. There’s something twisted and captivating about what Smohalla are doing with these songs, a build up and relief of pressure that carries a sense of ritual and feels truly avant-garde.
I do not know if Smohalla consciously chose to start with the familiar on Ruina Draconis and work their way out from there, or whether that is a coincidence. I do know that I’d have rather seen a bigger focus on the weirder, less archetypal material. Yes, I enjoyed Smohalla giving their version of the classic avant-black sound, but it doesn’t have the same attention grabbing properties of the more avant-garde songs that populate the album’s end. Here’s hoping Smohalla continue down that dragon hole and see what gold is there.
