Album Review : Baader-Meinhof (2020)

* Follow me on: Facebook - Twitter - Instagram *

I remember when SoundCloud rappers started their invasion of the music business. Dismissing them was so easy: they looked sloppy, they took way too much drugs and they quickly uploaded music on the internet without a care in the world about what anyone thought of them. I thought they were a fad, but they were a symbol of a new page turning in music history. These kids are good at everything and they not waiting for our permission to do cool shit.

A freakin’ rapper released one of the best black metal albums of 2020. Ghostemane’s side project Baader-Meinhof’s latest EP reminded me why I love extreme music so much.

This self-titled EP is a twelve minutes long project featuring a collection of ideas and moods that are not quite songs. The opener Evil Lives opens with a guitar riff played on a rusty-sounding acoustic guitar before blasting into a wall of distortion and reverb reminiscent of Burzum… you know, without the Nazi shit and all. Eric Whitney (Ghostemane’s civilian name) sings vocals on the track, but they’re so lost in reverb that they become fucking incomprehensible.

It is so cool and refreshing to hear a black metal song that isn’t a bloated, overwrought fiasco that thinks too highly of itself. Evil Lives, though its walls of distortion and nimble keyboards, is evoking feelings of melancholy, loneliness and frustration in a more powerful way than any seven minutes epic would. The recurring acoustic segments (a theme on the album) feel particularly sloppy and jagged on Evil Lives, which enhances the atmosphere of desolation too.

Stick in the Hard Place is another collection of ideas that don’t quite add up to a song. It follows a similar structure to Evil Lives, except the acoustic guitars are replaced by solemn keyboards. The bombastic drums and the skipping tempo of the song are reminiscent of older blackgaze bands like Lifelover and Alcest. You can hear Whitney’s lyrics better on this one, but he doesn’t say much and half of the song features only acoustic guitars & keyboard.

My favorite song on Baader-Meinhof is without a doubt To The Grave, which blends influences from classic rock and shoegaze into the one ambitious piece. It starts with a fury of ideas that stack upon one another in manic fashion, only to deconstruct itself and ends with a lengthy, looping guitar riff reminiscent of old Scorpions ballads. It really is the song on the record that expresses the scope of Eric Whitney’s creativity best, I find. It comes in powerful bursts.

Baader-Meinhof might be short and super fragmented, but it embodies what black metal is all about: a crushing, jagged wall of sound that exists for the sole purpose of burying your sorrow. It serves both an artistic and a practical purpose. It’s not meant to be polished and complete. It is supposed to hurt your fucking ears and make old wounds inside throb and it that regard, Baader-Meinhof is a success. It isn’t pretty or even quite coherent, but it is 100% heartfelt.

Another great thing about this new generation of multitalented artists with face tattoos (rappers doesn’t quite captures what they are, doesn’t it?) is that they distribute their music to whoever want to hear it. You can find it wherever music is streamed online and let its fury run through your veins. It’s a furious twelve minutes listen, where old and new ideas collide to create something that feels both different and oddly familiar.

7.9/10