Vadak

I have said this before, but the surest sign that an album should get a 3/3 from me is that it occupies a unique place in sonic space: it isn't beholden to a particular genre or style, and it isn't a faint echo of another, greater artist. Vadak really sounds like nothing else. It's weird at the beginning, and becomes weirder as it goes on. But unlike much weird music, it's catchy and engaging in surprising ways.

I knew that I was listening to something special when the bagpipes came in at 0:30 of the second track, "Köszöntsd a hajnalt," followed by an absorbing musical soundscape. The abrasiveness and weirdness of the bagpipes fused traditional folk music with black metal in a way that commanded my attention.

Of course, fusing folk music with black metal isn't novel. Half of black metal bands have a pretense of folkishness, and many of them dress in folk costumes. But here, for some reason, it really works.

The album contained other, more surprising genre fusions, especially in its second half. "A kupolaváros titka" can only be described as jazzy, with its 7/8 time signature and light touch on the cymbals. "Piros-sárga" is breathtakingly psychedlic: the metal influences are difficult to even find. Thy Catafalque has a deft touch with the synthesizer.

My favorite track, "Vadak (Az átváltozás rítusai)," is a perfect folk/black metal synthesis. After a rollicking guitar opening that, truth be told, I would have trimmed from the final edit of the song, the band lays down a melody on the cello that could be the accompaniment to two medieval warloads fighting a duel to the death. This music is so badass. When the fantasy/folk music needs to be kicked to the next level, the vocalist crashes in with some anguished screaming.

I learned after listening to this album that Thy Catafalque is a one-man band, which kind of makes sense, because the album has a lot of eccentricities. Just like The Lord of the Rings has meandering passages that would have been edited out if the trilogy had been composed by several writers, so Vadak has some pacing and structure issues. Fifteen minutes of the album's runtime could have been trimmed out. The flat male and female voices speaking on top of the tracks contribute little. But the eccentricities of this album made a track like "Vadak (Az átváltozás rítusai)" possible, so really I feel like I have nothing to complain about.

Try this and be patient if all you can see at first are the warts.