Kristian Espedal, aka Gaahl, is not one to wallow in nostalgia, nor is he one to stagnate artistically. While the artist continues to be associated with black metal, of which he is a key figure, he doesn't give a damn about labels, and places even less importance on respecting them. He proved it with Gaahls Wyrd, a fascinating project in which his extreme metal roots blended with doom, gothic and folk influences to create something mystical and fascinating. His second album, Braiding the Stories, is the logical continuation of this increasingly assertive approach.
This continuity is obvious from the very first moments of the album, as The Dream echoes the lyrics that concluded The Humming Mountain EP ("this is the voice underneath the dream"): logically, The Dream follows The Sleep and immediately immerses us in the unreal, dreamlike atmosphere of this new album. Above all, we get the feeling that Gaahls Wyrd have left their more violent features aside. So much the better: it's when he fully assumes his gothic theatricality and his role as mysterious narrator that Gaahl touches us the most with this project. With his multiple voices, he tells us different stories by the fireside, if possible by a moonless, starless night in an icy forest over which time has not yet had a hold. There's also something to be said about voices, a recurring theme in Gaahls Wyrd, as the singer seems to serve as a vessel to embody his stories and allow different entities to express themselves. This strange narrative dimension is reinforced by short tracks, two-minute transitions that install mystery and melancholy (Voices in my Head, Through the Veil).
Guitarist Ole Walaunet, a.k.a. Lust Kilman, seems to have fun adding touches of light to the singer's gloomy morgue and heavy, menacing diction, breathing life into the opaque, monolithic tone of the album, as in his solo on the title track... but he's also unleashing hell during the album's most incisive passages (Visions and Time and its management of tension, or Root the Will, whose epic start seems to plunge us little by little into madness, remind us that we're not here just to meditate in the darkness). Gaahls Wyrd refuses to repeat itself, but isn't afraid to look to the past to extract not only that gothic aesthetic, but also a certain psychedelia. The intense Time and Timeless Time is an eventful journey through eerie melodies, biting riffs and funereal heaviness, an element that always suits Gaahl's clear, deep voice, intimidating and seductive. And the Now, with its multiple voices and guitars that start with folk minimalism and plunge us into a fog closer to black metal, with its martial percussion and immemorial incantations, impresses.
One might well wonder whether the artist, in recently reactivating his black metal band Trelldom, wasn't taking the opportunity to exorcise his cravings for more extreme things (although, here too, there's no question of lazy pastism: Trelldom's comeback was closer to an Oranssi Pazuzu album than to a copy of a Bergen band from the early 90s!). Braiding the Stories is a dark mirage that frees itself from stylistic rules to better lose us in its poetic evocations. It's a captivating album, not only because it transports us into the different narratives Gaahl embodies and weaves for us, but also because it illustrates the creativity of an artist who remembers that the music from which he sprang was meant to transgress rules, not slavishly obey genre dogma. In the dark and hypnotic category, free from trivial considerations of genre or era, Gaahls Wyrd continues to try new things and excel.
