Artist: Bergrizen
Country: Ukraine
Label: Purity Through Fire
Formats: LP / CD
Year: 2024
Ukrainian Bergrizen has released no less than two albums in 2023. ‘Orathania’ from September last year almost entirely comprised of Ambient/Dark Folk-music with which it is paying homage to the nations heroic fight for freedom. Although Myrd’raal, the sole inspirer behind the band, urges to understand that ‘Orathania’ is not “stopgap”-recording, but truly a new way of putting his visions into music, late December 2023’s ‘Die Falle’ is a full-on Black Metal record that fits in the well-known Bergrizen tradition.
While Bergrizen has always fallen pretty much in the musical twilight zone between Burzum and Drudkh, the music has increasingly progressed to tilt in the direction of the latter. Their countrymates’ deeply rooted feeling for their native history and culture resulted in an extensive discography of genre-defining classics. Whether you prefer Drudkh’s more rawer sound or the slightly more polished recent affairs, they all bear the same similarity in incorporating Folk music into their otherworldly take on the Black Metal scene.
That might make Bergrizen not much of an original band, but just like other Ukrainian bands like Kroda, Khors, Nokturnal Mortem, Ygg, Kladovest and Dub Buk, they have kept a proud sound that is to be recognized out of thousands. The shifting to a more folk- and nature-induced sound, as opposed to the more depressive and Burzumish albums like my personal favourite ‘Der Unsterbliche Geist’ (2017), did eventually bring the band to this great and enchanting piece of new work: ‘Die Falle’.
Heavily laced with emotional melodies, dark humming strings and hypnotizing repetitive riffs, ‘Die Falle’ can easily be regarded as Bergrizen’s most monumental album to date. It captures the true essence of what I would call Ukrainian Black Metal: both dark and compelling, but mostly breathtakingly intense in terms of that unique balance between soothing beauty and blistering Black Metal. Sometimes it takes on a more dreamlike and folky atmosphere, sometimes it is fierce and wild, but most of the times the music is just flowing in between. Swinging back and forth allowing you to see all things from different perspectives all the time.
Progressive elements and even almost Post-Black Metal sort of song structures do collide magnificently with the basics of the very core of the bleak Black Metal riffs. Myrd’raal’s vocals are the icing to the proverbial cake here, his voice does not only give the music a very personal touch, it also swings it in different directions, fitting to the musical soundscape. It can be aggressive, mournful, exasperated, yearning… Everything within his vocal range seems to be used, while never going all too much over the top, giving the music a somewhat modest feeling, no, intimate more.
Ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, inflicting all possible injustice on a soerverein country, I heard Ukrainian Black Metal in a different perspective. The heroic nature of the music is something that had always attracted me, whether it’s the beautifully woven together melodies of Drudkh, the folky slant of Nokturnal Mortum or the bruising power of Hate Forest… All that has gained so much more depth and meaning now. In the same tradition, this new record by Bergrizen, ‘Die Falle’ can definitely act as the soundtrack of the strength of the Ukrainian people and culture.
