Album Review: Hexagraf - Walsen Van Hoop
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
It’s not always the easiest thing to latch on to an album, and sometimes despite how capable a given set of musicians might be, their efforts fail to move you. Other times, an apparently opaque piece of work needs brute force to chip your way into, but eventually, after a million listens, it clicks. A lot of this head-scratching often takes place in the nebulous ether between genres, where filaments of any and all origins clasp and tangle in esoteric morasses that take can take surgical patience to unpick. Theoretically at least. A lot of genre-bending projects can end up feeling a bit overcomplicated, as though they’re trying to be perspicacious and clever and progressive, but... well, we’ve all heard Illud Divinum Insanus after all. You can have a tonne of ideas, but no matter how good they are, you still need a convincing way to chain them all together. Otherwise, whatever you’re doing risks being a Frankenstein side project of irreconcilable concepts jammed into each other’s crevices sans a lick of rhyme or reason. But here comes Hexagraf, proffering their own cataclysmic offspring, sat squealing in the marshes betwixt black, death and doom. If pulled off, this concoction makes for dolorous, lengthening shadows, pitch in aspect, malign in design. Solid concept, but the question, as ever, is “Can they nail the execution?”
The maudlin spawn is baleful indeed, though not beyond chastisement. Keys wail in the shrill tongue of ghosts while gloomy melody lines like twins of Ahab’s woeful maritime requiems cut through the murk on “Stoflongen”. Deathly vocals belch up from soot-blacked lungs, dark motes caught in red-flecked saliva as a throttled growl bellows forth bleak testimonials. Brisker passages see the black metal evidence it’s presence, smothering waves of it sheeting in like rain. The mouldering death-doom of “Sterven is Vreten” creeps hungrily from the crypt and prowls its way through subsequent sections of crystalline beauty, simple alternating piano notes and deeply forlorn guitars gracing the rotten trudge of it’s footsteps. Likewise the diffusing eeriness of the title track’s plinking intro. Before it lumbers into a lead-footed chug riff. Some of the shine tarnishes; each individual moment is fine of itself, but the connective tissue sometimes lacks the development that might be wished for. With all the gears oiled, Hexagraf can transfix – take “Bijtend in de geest van productie” for instance: its closing moments are absolutely gorgeous, choral, harmonic, tragic, the solemn magnificence of grand tragedy seeping from it like spilled molasses. But the song doesn’t feel altogether like it knows how to get to that closure all that gracefully, which robs it of it’s potency somewhat. Instead of flowing into it like the Danube in moonlight, it rear-ends it with its tallywhacker flapping in the breeze with this slightly stilted drum fill then a sudden lurch from a faster preceding black metal section.
Hooded Menace released an album this year; if you liked it, then I’ve a feeling that you’ll also like Hexagraf’s morbid psalms. There’s the same lurid, zombified patrol of the mausoleums about it, the same exalting creepiness to it. Were it a movie, it’d be one of those seedy giallo exploitation flicks festooned with gratuitous bloodshed. It’s meant to evoke the dehumanising mazes of industry, all smog-black walls and cumbrous machinery. I’m not sure it’s altogether successful in that; the cover art is obviously a dead giveaway for what’s being attempted, but it’s a bit too…fun? For lack of a better word? For it to work seamlessly.
Hexagraf seem to demand of themselves a specific aura, a distinctly dark slip of the emotional spectrum ranging anywhere from melancholy to incandescent rage. A place with a torment to it, a psychological agony that grants it a weight beyond that summed by the components of it alone. And Hexagraf do achieve this, but patchily – “Koud Geslagen” rides a suicidally depressing doom riff of bent, weeping strings and clubbing percussion which summons that sense of striving to live in this hot, filthy, mechanical world of smoke and iron. But then the spooky bounce at 3.18 hits and everyone in the workhouse is struck with disco fever. The welfare state is a while off and the gruel rations are halved if your arse isn’t shaking. Whether that’s a flaw or not is down to you – I never stopped liking what I was hearing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I was gleaning from the album the exact thing that Hexagraf were trying to provide. There’s an argument to be made that they don’t consistently accomplish the aims their artwork and promo sheet outline, but it’s one I could only make half-heartedly. Plenty of people think the original Evil Dead was meant to be tongue-in-cheek but that wasn’t what Raimi had in mind while filming it. Does that prevent it being one of the most enjoyably campy gorefests of the 1980’s? Not a bit of it, and the movie deserves all the praise it gets even if it wasn’t precisely what was originally aimed for. I feel as though a similar point could be made for Hexagraf, too.
The thing is, doom isn’t really my “thing”. It’s not that i can’t appreciate the talent or legacy within the genre, but the slower things go the more my interest seems to wander. So maybe the biggest compliment I can pay here is that in Hexagraf’s case, it is those morose doom sections that I find most compelling. I heard that last Hooded Menace release, and generally found it to be a prime example of a style I typically blow hot and cold over. But if you’ve played it to death, reanimation, and then death again, and found yourself pondering what next cocktail of extreme metal grit and burgeoning doom misery should wet your throat – then clear a slot in your calendar for this Hexagraf release. Something tells me you’ll find yourself pleasantly immiserated by it.
