Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
There lives within each of us a small dark corner in which the appetite for darkness is ever gnawing at the psyche, like misguided moths with no appreciation for the sunlight, we have the ability to be drawn to the darkest parts of our fellow human beings, and it is only the brightness in our souls that stops us from being zapped or burned and seeing our moth like wings shattered.
The phrase, “Darkness be my friend”, may be a staple of the heavy-metal lyric in some eyes, but the genre only really touches upon such blackness in song, it never truly gets to the point where it understands the allusion in which one human can say to another, I Loved You At Your Darkest.
Like the moths that gather and flutter with intent at the strange neon light, almost praying in symbolic gesture at the electric, vengeful god before them, we are drawn occasionally to the darkness in people’s hearts, especially in the fields of the art and politics. Look to the genius in Van Gogh, it is riddled with the darkness of the mind, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, George Orwell’s nightmare in 1984 and the unveiling of the state, the frightening prospect that the two evils of Hitler and Stalin can still be looked up as icons, leaders of evil regimes and be feted by some, this is the love that some aspire to when they think of the darkness within.
It is a darkness captured with intensity in Behemoth’s latest release, I Loved You At Your Darkest, the representation of arguably their genre’s most aspiring band and observer of the darkness inherent in us all when pushed away from the bright light and into the cold clutches of extremism.
In tracks such as Wolves ov Siberia, God=Dog, Bartzabel, the pounding of If Crucifixion Was Not Enough, Sabbath Mater and We Are The Next 1000 Years, the chief architect of Polish Death Metal, Behemoth, take the idea of darkness to a new and intellectually demanding realm. The band, never one to suggest that their music is going to be enjoyed by all, let slip their own dogs of war and the ripping apart of the healthy soul is transformed into a constant battle of ideals, and it is one that is brutal, incredibly symphonic and worthy of the genre’s mission to explain that darkness itself is not to be shunned, that all human worth is viable, it just depends on the person being lauded.
A crucial album at a time when darkness threatens to overwhelm us, we need to stand in the light to be able to withstand the eyes cowering in the dark.
Ian D. Hall