ALBUM REVIEW: Vår Avgrund – Walk Through Fire

We live in a time of dwindling attention spans. Concentration is getting ever more brief, eroded under a barrage of distraction. For most, music has long been about brevity – three mere minutes, and you’re onto the next track, the next artist, the next genre. But some take a different approach. John Cage’s As Slow As Possible (with a potential run time of 639 years) and Jem Finer’s Long Player (which is designed to self-extend for up to a millennia) are arguably some of the more examples of music’s uncanny ability to push temporal boundaries beyond the limits of what’s deemed reasonable. Modern doom metal is a space where long form composition is de rigueur. That Swedish doom agonists WALK THROUGH FIRE‘s fourth full length Vår Avgrund (Our Abyss) weighs in at 75 minutes will not come as a huge surprise to most ardent doom acolytes.

But how their glacial, bleak dirges bend and shape space time during the listening experience is an ability few other artists can boast. Their caustic blend of doom, drone and sludge isn’t exactly meditative, but it is trance inducing nonetheless.

Opener Avgrund sets the tone with single, mournful strums, a brooding calm before the storm. What is noticeable immediately about WALK THROUGH FIRE‘s approach is an absence of urgency – content to let silence reign, to let notes and chords ring out to full effect. Den Utan Botten picks up the pace (albeit barely) and explodes into a grating, sucking mire of dour fuzz. Dense, claustrophobic, it achingly blooms, huge chords and glacial riffing peppered with distant guitar whines, roiling feedback, and crashing cymbals before coming to an abrupt stop.

Vägar Mot Slutet glowers and churns, vast chasms of sparseness offset by atonality. Moving at a predatory gait, the band focus on organic growth and remorseless repetition, a burst of screaming, frantic sax piercing the gloom before being buried beneath quaking chords. Till Intet Gjord is the first track to really ramp up the runtime; huge chords reaching tendrils out into empty space, proceeding under tentative toms and grunting bass. Pitched over a droning layer of creeping organ noise, jarring stop/start chords and layered, spit-flecked shrieks adding to the towering sense of dread. There’s no light here, just painful, bleak melancholia.

Ett Inre Krig snakes with splashing cymbals and low bass rumbles, allowing you to hear the very air move and shake in protest. It left turns into tolling funereal bells, bright guitar strums, breathy and ethereal before being crushed under the weight of sheer tone. Att Leva Är Att Lida is immediately confrontational, a rising layer of noise pitted against slow drum pulses and vile, viscous chords. Taking a deep dive into a pitch black, suffocating pit of filth, drums stutter and fitfully protest under shrieking guitars. Boiling, dramatic, and terrifying, it ends on a coup de gras of lancing feedback.

Tragedin (no prizes for guessing the English translation) is a final, perilous ascent. Single chords ring and are swallowed almost instantly by silence, building into hammer blows. Layer by layer the track builds into an oppressive, high-pressure abyss of atonal guitars, massive tone and a constant, maddeningly intangible noise later that stays forever just out of reach. Giving way to a final, near endless repetition of frail organ melody, it’s a moment of unsettling bliss that, when it finally abates, gives way to a silence as deafening as anything else on the record.

A final note on the album is the conspicuous quality of the vocals. Extreme metal is a genre renowned for guttural, animalistic vocal attacks, but there is something about WALK THROUGH FIRE‘s retched, wretched delivery of throat ruining, acidic screams and howls that sets a new bar.

Vår Avgrund is not a record for the faint of heart or short of concentration. It is not just time consuming, but all consuming – will, energy, commitment. It is an experience, a cathartic journey that will leave you drained, a weaving that makes 75 minutes seem at once both 75 seconds and 75 years. An exercise in tension and release, this is what all modern doom records should aspire to achieve.

Rating: 9/10

Vår Avgrund is out now via Wolves & Vibrancy Records.

Like WALK THROUGH FIRE on Facebook.