ALBUM REVIEW: Polar Veil – Hexvessel
A lonely town adorns the front cover of HEXVESSEL’s sixth record, Polar Veil, while a creature wearing the night sky like a cape looms overhead. It cuts a chilly and chilling portrait of isolation, vulnerable to the elements and all manner of natural and supernatural entities. Bandleader Mat Kvohst McNerney and his troupe have always been in tune with the world around them, channelling the forest through their folk-influenced psychedelic rock, but this time around they have tapped into something more sinister. Gone is the sound of Cosmic Truth’s elegant waltz, replaced entirely by black metal intensity and eerie discordant melodies that wallow in a sense of unease.
McNerney’s gothic croon bridges the gap from the band’s previous work, and while the sound of Polar Veil is quite the leap, it’s one the frontman says came naturally to their development. “Nature represents freedom, darkness and the call of the wild,” he says. “Black metal has always been at the borders of my sound and playing, at the heart of everything I do. Tradition, nature, ritual, mythology, mysticism and philosophy, along with clashing and jarring chords have always been synonymous with HEXVESSEL.” Same soul, different body.
Like with another of his projects, the excellent GRAVE PLEASURES, McNerney keeps the spirit of Robert Smith alive, his voice always somewhere between mournful and longing. Despite upping the ante with Polar Veil, he never sacrifices his trademark tunefulness, here an effective lure into the bleak vast of snow-covered hinterland. This is in many ways a black metal record for people who don’t like black metal’s most abrasive features, but who find themselves willingly lost among its atmospheric paeans to frost-covered landscapes.
To close out the record’s intro, McNerney repeats “The tundra is awake, while the world is sleeping” like an incantation over a doomy procession, stirring creatures from their slumber. The glacial rhythms of Older Than The Gods evoke long winter nights and the sorrow that accompanies them, dwelling on forgotten tales that time has left behind. McNerney paints the twilight by dropping “crepuscular” and “vespertine” like they are everyday words, setting the scene for some cosmic horrors out in the cold. When he sings of hearing the landscape on Listen To The River, it is with a terrifying awe at an ancient power that deserves respect.
The reverence for the world, our place in it, and all its unknowns are all here as per HEXVESSEL’s stock in trade, but this time around there is a profound loneliness brought about by their new sound. That this sound comes as second nature to McNerney speaks to the power of the freezing temperatures around his log cabin last winter when he wrote Polar Veil. Whether it be a forlorn ghost lingering round its old haunts or The Groke in The Moomins, the cold is synonymous with our need to seek warmth of the emotional and spiritual kind. As the seasons change, it is the perfect record for the nights drawing in and the wind picking up – just make sure to have a mug of tea handy. Polar Veil is the shadows cast by limbs of leafless trees and the amplified silence from a blanket of snow, and it may well be McNerney‘s most majestic masterpiece yet.
Rating: 8/10
Polar Veil is set for release on September 22nd via Svart Records.
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