Shining "halmstad (Niklas angaende niklas)

A friend whose career in chemistry led him abroad to Europe has been my liason to the rich metal community thriving on that continent. When he visits I love hearing his stories of European culture and his unique perspective of the characters in his life.  I am envious of his access to many of the exotic metal bands in my cd collection, a great deal of them he introduced to me.
     This CD by #shining was one of those game changing albums that he introduced me to. It also introduced the sub-genre of Depressive Suicidal Black Metal (dsbm). A dumb title, but the accepted one.  Basically these are black metal bands with often slower tempos, unintelligible lyrics about depression and suicide (duh) and many times folk instrumentation is folded in.  I quickly fell in love with this style of music, it's as if many of my beloved slowcore bands became blindly misanthropic and started using their music to assault instead of sulk.  Well that's the way I fantasize anyway. This Shining disc is the encapsulation of all of that self-loathing musical experience. It's actually pretty breath taking if you give yourself up to the experience (an obvious intention I suppose given the title of the sub-genre)
My chemist friend has caught the band live a few times across the pond. He's tantalized me with stories of the band's self-mutilating performances.  Blood, spit and alcohol, by his accounts loads of blood, the vocalist is infamous for savagely cutting himself onstage and tossing razor blades into the crowd. In all honesty I'm pretty squeamish about that stuff, but I cannot disregard the emotional impact that this artistic statement of nihilism has.  I'm sure I'd be in the audience, I'm also sure I'd be very uncomfortable.  It's the same romanticism that has drawn me to greek tragedies, Hesse's "steppenwolf" and Shakespeareian teen suicides. Man this stuff is dark.  This album is a window into that hopelessness.  Morbid fascination I suppose, but they say that we feel most alive in the face of death.  This album is a staredown.