Album Review: Göden, Beyond Darkness
Beyond Darkness is built and tailored to be opaque. In many ways, its title sets the goal: Göden are going beyond darkness. Whether that means to something lighter and more hopeful or something that the band’s Svart Records-released debut album engages directly in a linear narrative across its consuming 19 tracks and 72-minute runtime, but the title is also a reference to the band’s own past, particularly that of guitarist Stephan Flam and keyboardist/narrator Tony Pinnisi in forever-underrated New York death-doom pioneer Winter, whose lone-but-pivotal full-length, Into Darkness (discussed here), was released in 1990. Göden as a unit is intended as a progression and a next step from what Winter were, hence the “beyond.” And the new trio, completed by lead vocalist Vas Kallas — best known for her work in industrialists Hanzel und Gretyl — are indeed more complex. While rooted in the extreme end of doom, Beyond Darkness uses its core narrative of the “coming of the age of Göden” (pronounced “god-in”) to unfold in a back and forth of lurching volume swells of charred riffing and ambient spoken pieces.
As for the story, each member of the band has their role to play, whether it’s Flam setting the core instrumental backdrop as ‘Spacewinds,’ Pinnisi accompanying there on keys and speaking as ‘The Prophet of Göden’ during the series of interludes titled as “Manifestation” between longer tracks — between the songs, as it were — or Kallas with her growling rasp as ‘Nyxta,’ representing darkness. And the storyline that plays out through the bulk of the material — I’m not sure where “Komm Susser Tod” (“come sweet death”) or the closing take on Winter‘s “Winter” fit in the plot — is written out in the liner for the CD and the 2LP, but comes through in the narration as well, moving from the nine-minute instrumental opener “Glowing Red Sun” through “Twilight” and “Cosmic Blood” split by “Manifestation I: Tolling Death Bells” along the way to “Komm Susser Tod” and the catchy-in-spite of itself “Genesis Rise” with two more “Manifestation” interspersed.
To say it’s a lot to take in is something of an understatement. Considering Winter‘s last studio outing was 1994’s Eternal Frost — which Svart has reissued, along with Into Darkness — one might think Flam has been sculpting the storyline and breadth of Göden over the last 26 years, but it’s been at least five since Winter‘s on-stage reunion came apart and he proceeded on to the new project, bringing in Kallas and Pinnisi as well as a host of drummers, guest guitarists, a violinist, etc., culminating in the massive work that is Beyond Darkness. Perhaps the album’s greatest triumph is that despite the varying contributors along the way around the core trio and despite the back-and-forth nature of the proceedings between interludes and fits of extreme doom metal, it manages to remain cohesive and indeed only seems to become more so as it proceeds. It might be that as Göden plunge ever deeper into the miasma of their own making, they enact a kind of Stockholm syndrome on the listener, but I put it up to world-creating. The album crafts its own setting, plot and characters, and it tells its own story. Therefore, as you listen, you take it on as you would take on a novella.
And sure, some of the language in pieces like “Manifestation III: The Spawn of Malevolence” and “Manifestation V: The Epoch of Göden” and the later “Manifestation VII: Gaia Rejuvenated” is over the top, but that grandiosity becomes an essential facet of the presentation. Like Triptykon before them, Göden use a theatrical posture in darkness as part of an overarching sense of their command of their songwriting and, in this case, dramatic storytelling. And cuts like “Dark Nebula” — on which church organ and the splash of Scott Wojno‘s drums resound behind Kallas in a striking midsection — and the reinvention of Black Sabbath‘s “Black Sabbath” that is “Ego Eimie Gy” are highlights unto themselves, standing up to scrutiny even when removed from the context of the record as a whole. One couldn’t necessarily say the same for individual “Manifestation” pieces — though certainly all eight of them together would work — but they’re not meant to be experienced in that way in the first place, so it’s moot.
As at last Beyond Darkness arrives at “Night,” which isn’t the finale but comes ahead of the epilogues-of-a-sort “Manifestation VIII: A New Age” and “Thundering Silence” — plus the “Winter” cover that rounds out — the proceedings feel perhaps more grueling than ever, and the lineage from Winter to Göden is laid bare for the listener to behold. And yet, even around that raw, plodding riff, there is evidence of the new outfit’s mission: the keyboards that surround, Kallas‘ language- and mythology-swapping lyrical invocations and the underlying focus on atmosphere that ultimately is what draws Beyond Darkness together as an entire work no less overwhelming than it intends. It’s not supposed to be accessible. It’s not supposed to be for everyone. It’s supposed to be for those willing to meet it on its own, uncompromised terms.
The howls of the last “Manifestation” give way to the creeping guitar and drone, and, finally, nothingness of “Thundering Silence” and when the telltale chug of “Winter” takes hold, its reinterpretation is something of an afterthought given just how much the album prior has worked to get the message across that Göden are to be considered as distinct but grown out of the band that was. Will there be another Göden album? Can there be? I don’t know. Between the ground that Beyond Darkness covers aesthetically and in its plot and characterizations — not to mention the fact that the story is finished at the end of the record — one would have to think a follow-up would entail some reimagining of how the band functions. Maybe even a permanent drummer. As it stands, however, Beyond Darkness is a testament to brutality as artistry. It harnesses bleak visions of the world that is and reshapes it along stark lines of blackened aural decay that more than lives up to the task it sets itself in its name.
Whatever comes next, even if nothing does, Beyond Darkness remains, and will remain. In that most of all, it is the essential answer to what Winter accomplished those years ago.
