A reaction to the less savoury elements of black metal, Norway's hard rockers are dragging heavy music into the 21st century
Nekromantik, the controversial career highlight of German movie director J�rg Buttgereit, is a film that stays with you. It is, after all, rife with depictions of murder, suicide, self-abuse and, predominantly, corpse-based copulation. More than 20 years later, Buttgereit's 1987 censor-baiter has become unlikely thematic inspiration for a wave of warped guitar-slingers flooding out of the Norwegian capital Oslo like a broken fjord. Gladly, these discordant bands don't do the bad thing with deceased folk, preferring instead to breathe new life into what they see as a dead native rock scene.
Taking the dissonance of Nordic black metal but losing the dubious undercurrents of nationalism (and worse) that have dogged the Scandinavian musical counterculture, these bands make a racket inspired by American noise rock and British hardcore punk. The intellectualism of black metal is retained (despite what tabloids screamed at the time, only a tiny minority of black metal's "second generation" outfits were murderous church-burners) and this is especially the case when it comes to Haust, who are an integral part of nihilistic collective the Black Hole Crew. Haust's latest album, Powers of Horror, is named after an essay on abjection by Bulgarian-French feminist Julia Kristeva, for example. Vikings and Norse mythology are conspicuous by their absence.
"I don't think there are many good bands left in Norway," says Haust vocalist Vebj�rn Guttormsgaard M�llberg. "You had all these black metal bands that shocked, did all this crazy stuff. Now there's almost no shock value left. Everyone has got too much money from the state." Norway is a land of widespread government-funded arts, and this does not necessarily make for great alternative art. "They become boring," explains the Haust singer. "The state is looking for something safe, something that's dead, lying there, that they can fuck back to life. I thought it was a fitting image for the hard music scene in Norway."
"The focus is very different from how the old black metal bands viewed the world," says Kjetil Nernes, frontman with necromantic stalwarts �rabrot, "with only individualism and bleak pessimism linking the two."
Haust applied the term "necromantic" to Scandinavian metal in the song Nekromantik Norway. This was also the name of a triple-pronged tour in autumn 2010 ? the scene-defining lineup of which featured Haust sandwiched between �rabrot (named, fantastically, after a Norwegian municipal dump) and Okkultokrati, a crust-punk-indebted quartet who reference highbrow subjects such as atheistic metaphysics while revelling in such delightful pseudonyms as Verminscum. The thread connecting the trio, and the wider scene, is label Fysisk Format, run by respected Oslo independent record store Tiger.
"It's impossible to speak of a scene in Norway per se before Tiger established Fysisk Format in 2008," says Kjetil. "At the time Fysisk Format started, a new generation bred on the Melvins and Darkthrone spawned. All of a sudden there's a flourishing scene emerging from the underground, which is amazing."
"We don't have a political agenda," Vebj�rn says, "but we don't want to sell Norwegian nationalism or black metal mythology either. The nationalism related to Norwegian culture through the years is so unsexy. We want to go in another direction and be ourselves, not zombies from this safe, rich country."
Okkultokrati and Haust tour the UK in February and April respectively. �rabrot's Revenge, Haust's Powers of Horror and Okkultokrati's No Light for Mass are all out now on Fysisk Format
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