By Karl R. De Mesa
There will always be room for shamanism in black metal. After all, rock stars are some of the best kind of shamans.
And the front men of modern black metal in particular have now eschewed the traditional trappings of the genre’s leather vest and pants, steel-pointed arm bands and shin guards, and the ubiquitous corpse paint to ambitiously both purify and amplify the uniquely harsh hymns of the Scandinavian cold.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that Deafheaven, the metal act that has crossed the kvlt divide and brought the indie kids into the embrace of the northern cold, was a revelation to see live.
Deafheaven was the headliner for the All of the Noise Music Showcase organized by the Rest is Noise Ph, held last November 23 at the Century City Mall Events Hall in Poblacion, Makati City. The concert was part of a two-day event that included talks from speakers in the local and regional industry and a music market on the last day where vendors like indie labels and vinyl collectors could sell their wares.
On the night of the gig the American band was prefaced by sets from local acts Autotelic, Cheats, Oh! Flamingo, and She’s Only Sixteen, and from Ely Buendia’s Offshore Music Records label like Apartel, Ena Mori, and One Click Straight.
That was only the musical undercard, though. The big names were reserved for the later part of the night with Singapore indie rock band M1LDL1FE, a reunion set from supergroup Cambio, and English indie-math rockers Delta Sleep.
Deafheaven took the stage at around 1AM and it was clear right away why this quintet, who’d converted so many indie kids to their blend of black metal and modern shoegaze, was a very singular and unique force.
Nominated for a Grammy and hailed as Vice Magazine “Artist of the Decade,” the band immersed the Filipino audience in an almost-hour long set that opened with the rousing “Brought to the Water” off of 2015’s New Bermuda, and then segued to “Honeycomb,” a brooding and elegiac track with references to Argentine writer Julio Cortazar’s stories that clocks in at 11 minutes from their latest album Ordinary Corrupt Human Love.
Front man George Clarke was a ripped, tall, rangy leader of kvlt ritual, waving his arms through the lengthy instrumental breaks like a mad conductor punctuating the drama.
Traditional black metal is often an exercise in redundancy of form and convention, almost earnestly parochial in its insularity, and yet Deafheaven are nothing if not metalheads first. They parlay all the aesthetics of the genre: the tremolo picking, the blast beats, the guttural Cookie Monster vocals made for atmosphere rather than as setup to something a crowd can sing along to. But there is also a deep passion here for shoegaze, ambient music strains like post-rock, and more than a little bit of psychedelic stoner metal.
Even as the surplus of notes and attack cover the black metal checklist, the atmospheric elements exist not only for texture or a quiet-loud dynamic, but to fill the soundscape with color, more room for shades beyond black, white, or grey that’s commonly the only palette of the Norwegian and Scandinavians black metallists. For Clarke and guitarists Kerry McCoy and Shiv Mehra, bassist Chris Johnson, and drummer Daniel Tracy it’s a crucial, palpable time for meditation.
As the band went through the rest of their set with “Glint” and “Sunbather,” both lengthy songs that work in suite movements clocking in at 10 minutes plus, the mosh pit had stirred again, provoking itself for more intense dancing as the final movement of “Sunbather” writhed into climax.
Like their modern black metal contemporaries—particularly Danish Amalie Bruun’s solo project Myrkur and Wolves in the Throne Room (fellow Americans from Olympia, Washington)—Deafheaven are taking the idea and appreciation from the Scandinavian genre’s cold tool kit and making it their own: expansive, colorful, and undeniably American. They are a firebrand for these times and their journal is full of this decade’s pain and beauty.
Deafheaven juxtaposed numerous, seemingly incompatible styles of music into a unified singularity. Yet you can still trace their sound to the original elders of the tribe like Mayhem and Dimmu Borgir albeit they are neither constrained nor intimidated by what those guys and their fans represent—often a puritanical knee-jerk peer pressure attached with a “true” label, as in True Norwegian Black Metal. With all the strains now, from sludge to death to doom, what does that even mean?
By the time they closed their set with the epic “Dream House,” off of 2013’s Sunbather, it was clear Clarke and his comrades are shamans of the first order, intuitive and sans pretense in taking other people with them on a trip to sonic glory.
Clarke queried himself in that dissonant kvlt scream as the band soared through “Dream House’s” ambient denouement of trilling notes and crashing cymbals: “I’m dying / Is it blissful? / It’s like a dream.”
These metalheads from San Francisco may not have an exact map to get from Point A to Point B, but they will entertain you all the way to the gates of ecstasy. And Deafheaven know this ritual well.