Album Review - Year of No Light: "Ausserwelt"

Good evening my special little snowflakes!

I've finished my masters dissertation! Here's an incredibly irritating gif to celebrate!

With that party atmosphere created I'd like to totally ruin it by reviewing a slow-paced, introspective post-metal album, in an introspective and slow-paced way.

Year of No Light are a French band from Bordeaux, originally with a sludgy vocal-driven sound. However, they parted ways with their vocalist, added a guitarist and a second drummer and decided to move in a more post-metal direction.


The result of this lineup change is the mysterious and utterly enthralling Ausserwelt. A sprawling, atmospheric   4-track instrumental album spanning over 45 minutes, this is not an album for people who lose patience with long songs, or indeed slow songs. The tracks here take a while to pick up pace, but for good reason. Once Year of No Light get the juggernaut rolling, the result is a thundering wall-of-sound which envelops the listener like an icy fog, and the behemoth-style impact is all the more forceful for the slow build ups. Keeping the track listing to a minimal 4 allows the band to make the album a whole experience for the listener; it all works extremely well together. The album artwork, monochrome and moody, is a perfect fit for the music, and with the band giving what I hope are tongue-in-cheek jobs for themselves in the credits (for example, "funeral hermeneutics" or "electrical geometry") the scene is set for a deep, dark album.

      "Nope, we don't know what 'heavy cosmogony' is either.

But it sounds cool, doesn't it?"

The first tracks are two parts of the same piece (suite? concerto? it's hard to tell with these things) named after the Greek goddess of the underworld Persephone. Beginning with faint strains of organ and feed-backing guitars, a shimmer of cymbals sets off the highly textured guitars, laying down powerfully melancholy riffs; tremolo picking abounds here, but not in an indistinct black-metal way. The heavy bass sections play off wonderfully with eerie guitar lines. Cymbals crash and almost sound like they're about to shatter throughout the heavier sections giving the track a shimmering quality, like mirages over a storm at sea. When the track suddenly drops pace, it makes way for a titanic doom-laden breakdown, all the while the guitars shimmering and gliding overhead, which is just joy to behold. Part one of Persephone, called in parentheses Enna, is a mournful track, almost with a sense of grief, but with a thunderous quality, like it is mirroring some natural cataclysm.


Part 2, Coré merges in perfectly as the feedback and organ-like drone at the end of Enna and fades into a pounding of what sound like war-drums, which punctuate with all the more force due to the double-percussion setup used. The guitars provide a textural fuzz and crackle over the top, as a melodic line more ominous than in Enna and an unashamedly doom-metal influenced chord progression cut through. If the last track was a cataclysm tearing through the land, this is the armies of the dead reclaiming it. Yet the feel here isn't the corny old doom we might expect, the shimmering, enveloping sound still pervades everything, making the melancholy atmosphere seem less "evil" and more inevitable, natural, awe-inspiring. This kind of post-metal tries to evoke the sublime; the awesome beauty of disaster. A spidery guitar line intersects the doomy riff, unsettling in slow-paced discord, yet utterly transfixing. When listening to Coré at its most intense you can almost hear rocks crashing and crumbling into a turbulent sea around you.


Coré melts away with a glimmer, but the peace only lasts for a second until the threatening fuzzy riffage of Hiérophante thrusts the listener straight into the underworld itself. Ausserwelt is German for "otherworld" and this album does feel oddly alien, like you have been transported to a place where destruction and calamity happen on a scale never before seen. The multi-layered riffing makes way for a faster, more treble-laden section, which always makes me think of river rapids, ending in a waterfall of terrifying proportions, as the thick guitars stomp back onto the scene like titans. The ever present and relentless drumming adds urgency and tension to the track and it eventually builds up to an almighty maelstrom of sound. All instruments speed up electrifyingly until it all ends abruptly to bow out in diffuse drones.

Basically it's like this, but with less gospel music.

The final track, Abbesse is the culmination of everything that came before. Strangely chilled out, yet eerie tremolo guitars open the track, before being drowned out in an epic giant-paced riff, which speeds up to include the tremolo of before, before it all arrives at a piercing and almost regal sounding melody, as if the royal court of the underworld were in procession. This, however, is cut short with threatening minor chords (what else?) which build up to a an almost animalistic release, as if some gigantic mythical creature were in the throes of death. The shrill cries of the guitars sound melancholy and fearful. The drums pound to new levels of intensity, the double-kit setup allowing for almost chaotic sounding percussion over the increasingly hellish guitars. The energy has to give out sometime and with a crash it ends; a gentle feedback-based melody fades the album out.


In short then, Ausserwelt is melancholy, epic, mysterious, intense, awe-inspiring, enveloping and extremely cohesive. It's genuinely one of the best post-metal albums out there and I think it's a game-changer. The obvious influences from doom and black metal improve and are improved by the pacing and structure of the songs and the whole atmosphere is ominous, even a little scary, but sublime. Many listeners may be put off by the slow-paces, the oppressive atmosphere, the frequent use of feedback to end tracks and the lack of vocals, but for me it's an amazing musical experience and should be considered as important to post-metal as Isis's Oceanic or Cult of Luna's Salvation. Buy this album, stick on your headphones and enter another world.


I leave you with a live recording of Persephone. Watch for the duel drums, they're mesmerising to watch. Year of No Light are due to record another album next year and I cannot wait.

The Myth of Manflu

This article was originally written for the Dundee students' magazine The Magdalen and appeared somewhere in the middle of 2011. I thought it would dust it off as it's one I'm quite happy with, and (I think) is still very relevant. More up-to-date posts will follow soon. Promise. 

It’s become a mainstay of commentary on men in the media. Manflu, the woman in the advert says, rolling her eyes in a “you know what I’m talking about, girls” kind of way. As I have approached what society deems adulthood, I have been introduced to this term in what I can only describe as a very uncomfortable way. It was like turning 18 and suddenly realising that the adults always invited at least one alien to their dinner parties and being asked to shake its tentacle – I wasn’t sure this was entirely right, but I went along with it anyway. When I was younger, it was all fairly straightforward, if I was ill there were procedures to go through to try and get better, and people only challenged me on it if I was supposed to be doing a test that day. But when thrust into the adult world, I found myself starting to be told to “man-up” and found some people rolling their eyes at my illness in a sort of pathetic aping of the advert-people. I was all of a sudden being told from some quarters that I had manflu, and to begin with I honestly didn’t know what on earth they were on about. I was just… ill! What the hell did being a man have to do with it?

So what is manflu anyway? Wikipedia defines it as “the pejorative term that refers to the idea that when many men have a cold, they exaggerate and claim they have the flu.” That clears that up then I suppose, move on. Well, no, let’s not move on. As much as anything, this wouldn’t be very interesting to read if I just copied everything from Wikipedia, but also let’s take a closer look at what’s really going on here. The idea of “manflu” is an odd one, because it’s a male stereotype which seems to make men out to be in a position of weakness, a little pathetic. Woohoo! We all say. It’s a victory against gender roles! Men are equally as capable of whining as women, in fact, more so! Well, hang on; let’s not get too ahead of ourselves here. Manflu is defined as a deception on the part of the man, a way to trick the people around him into feeling more sympathetic for his plight. Wait a minute! He’s not being pathetic and whiny at all, he’s being sneaky! He’s a Machiavellian genius attempting to wring more than his fair share of sympathy out of his friends and family!

You see, far from subverting gender rôles, the myth of manflu tries to reinforce them. It’s all about trying to define what a “man” actually is. If there is the idea of there being this big generalised concept of manflu which can be attributed to a large section of the male population, there has to be an idea of fixed male attributes to begin with. If you’re going to try and make sweeping generalisations about a group, you need to have an idea of what that group is. You know, things like the Jews are all secretly loaded because they’re greedy and scrimping, gay men are always dressed well because they always pay attention to fashion and journalists always make stuff up because they’re lazy. If men have “manflu” it’s because all men have certain traits that make them likely to become such lying bastards.

It’s very telling that the term “manflu” is so often coupled with the equally odious term “man up”. The assumption being that if a male is complaining about being ill he is whining and needs to act more like a real man. A “real man”, you see, isn’t supposed to complain when he is ill. So wait, men pretend to have flu because they want attention, but a “real man” doesn’t act up when he’s poorly? There’s some difference between some men (who whine when they are ill) and “real men” who never whine? What’s a “real man” then? We’ve already seen he doesn’t complain about being ill, so what are his other traits?

Well, if you believe that annoying advert for male perfume on FX, real men wear pink. If you watch the ad, however, real men are also a number of other things, unattainably muscular for a start, hairless and constantly gallivanting naked around expensive-looking penthouse apartments with scantily-clad women. Now I don’t know about the men reading this, but personally, I’m not particularly fit, waxing me would take, well, weeks and frankly, I have more important things to do than show lingerie models around flats I could never afford, it’s just impractical. The website AskMen.com (which is always good for some good old fashioned gender rôle reinforcing) defines a “real man” as someone who “doesn’t moan, doesn’t complain, doesn’t get sick…” Seriously? A real man has Wolverine-like healing abilities?! When was this instituted? There’s not being a hypochondriac, and then there’s the moronic idea that nothing can ever injure you. AskMen goes on (and on, and on) claiming that “a real man is macho; a real man is tough; a real man doesn't show emotions. A real man is the backbone of his family and doesn't have time to be weak. If spiders scare you, you'll never be a real man.” Well, at least I’m not scared of spiders, wouldn’t want to be totally one of those, y’know, fake men. Terrifyingly, the article suggests to us that if life is being a “b*tch” (oh they’re so coy) one is advised to “slap it and move on.” I’ll be backing away slowly now.

Sadly the insane matchopocalypse of AskMen.com is not an isolated case. These ideas about the kind of person a man “should be” are still very prevalent in our culture, it would have to be, otherwise being able to say things like all a man’s “personal hygiene needs must be taken care of by a woman” (no really, they say that too, you can look it up) would not be acceptable, certainly not on a fairly mainstream site like AskMen. The fact is that this kind of batshit lunacy still exists and is still absorbed by so many men. The call of “manflu” is just another way for people to reinforce the idea that men shouldn’t be complaining about being ill, and if they are, they must obviously be exaggerating. This takes on a darker meaning than just purely in the realm of social power-relations when we realise that these kinds of ideas are detrimental to men’s health. Men are statistically far less likely than women to go to the doctor if they feel ill and routinely die years earlier than women. This social pressure for men to just “man up” and “deal with it” seriously effects people’s lives meaning men are less likely to pick up on something serious and, obviously, suffer for it. Let’s face it guys, we all get ill, and its not fun – obviously it gets annoying if someone’s complaining about it all the time, but we shouldn’t be telling people that just because they’ve got external genitals that they’re not allowed to feel ill. Basically my message for the men reading this is next time someone tells you to “man up” or that you’ve just got “manflu” – sneeze on them. Like really evacuate your nose all over them. Then call them a sexist. I’m all about the justice.