Havohej
Review: Exploring the inherent duality of "idiot savant" music Havohej structure simple songs out of predictable but stolid and violent intervals between notes. In a method similar to the music of Incantation, Havohej move simple repetitions between radically opposite rhythms and then alter the vectors of their riff composition. The resulting brutality entirely arises from the angry and abundant tension in the music.
Sawing riffs fly over ambient repetition drumming in the style of Bathory, but with enough rhythmic dynamic to cycle and then reflect off of a pitch harmonic shrieked on the cycle's return. Nihilistic, modern, and simplistic composition add to the idiot side of this music, making it seem feral - repulsive - often effectively riveting from its brazen simplicity and the clear message evoked by the primitive data relationships in the chromatic scale.
Copyright © 1991 Candlelight
A voice like Paul Ledney is hard to find, and his exceptionally searing and fleshtorn vocals plod conveniently behind the bizarre and random but rhythmically cogent elements of each song. Usually only two major ideas alternate in a song, with small variation instantions of each being used for further offset. The same insane narrative that guides us in each song concludes the album with an a capella indictment of gOD and blasphemy of all that is holy, forcing uneasiness on the listener who feels his or her throat drying from the concept of that kind of vocal work.
With whatever deficits of composition can be extracted from observation of this piece of work, it is apparent that it at least seems to be by design that simplicity and doom-like minimalism are enforced upon the hapless listener. In this the aesthetik of nihilism is achieved to new fullness, and from there Havohej build what they can, including some new voicings of ideas shared genetically by death and black metal.
Review: The triumphant return of Havohej occurs in a provocative nihilism in which guitars are assaulted and reduced to a rumbling texture of harmonic shape while vocals and constant battery encoding rhythmic opposition to a self-established dominant theme bring forth one of the few truly resonant statements of black metal in unleashed hatred of all that is melodic, easy to like, friendly and in any way consistent about its statements and theory to the point of being stamped from form. Those who criticize this release must acknowledge this: Havohej tested the capacity of the underground for abstraction with conceptually visual and neo-Wagnerian intent to reduce our rockish expectations of metal and bring black metal to a new level of form if nothing else, hatefully, spitefully and bigotedly destroying guitar and song expectations in structural rubric entirely with roaring, virulent and nasty music.
Best conceived as a whole or in the instant of parsing, this work consists of an essential theme made ludicrous in essence and then divided multiple times as it devolves across a trellis structure of existential ambitions and ideas. This trellis in the subconscious mind seen as patterns in the pulsing landscape of these bare and confrontationally human songs of themes altering listener perceptive expectations of reality through mood, is recognizable in organic unfolding of structure through deliberate acts of seeming randomness which in their assembly as sensible object assert ambitions that both subvert and nurture social conceptions of individual growth and value. In this some might say this release is relegated to an obscure echelon of metal warriors but the caveat must be added, "and like all releases from Havohej, its ideas will be propagated by others who are both getting a bonus by ripping it off and doing its work by spreading the virus."
In a bassy echoing nothingspace the rumbling distant guitar is reduced to the simplest of tonal distinctions as it fills a space with a humorous satire of black metal "true" guitar, assaulting both form by exceeding it and convention by violating melody like a busy occultist left alone with the corpse of Christ. The slackly conceived yet exhilaratingly self-obsessed morbid chanting of Ledney goes over the top consistently and thrusts into the face of the listener a performance art of disintegrating persona, emphasizing the lawless nature of black metal. Beyond this instrumentation is pure noise which in resonant symphony texturally wraps narrative changes within developing theme in the esoteric but absolutist tradition of black metal.