“Genever” enters with a melody that seems to have wandered in from a damaged folk record and become trapped inside black metal. The guitar does not settle into a clean tremolo pattern; it circles, staggers and accumulates additional lines while programmed drums keep an inflexible pulse beneath it. Ravenlord’s voice arrives crammed with syllables, screaming across the phrasing rather than conforming to it. Within minutes, Ljuset establishes why Woods of Infinity remains difficult to place. The Swedish duo uses familiar black-metal materials, but its melodies, vocal cadences, samples and emotional contradictions obey rules that belong almost entirely to the band.
Recorded between April and July 2005 by Ravenlord and Melkor, Ljuset was the second Woods of Infinity album released that year, following Hejdå. Melkor handled guitar, bass and drum programming, while Ravenlord supplied vocals and samples; both contributed lyrics. The arrangement is skeletal in personnel but dense in execution. Multiple guitar lines overlap until apparently simple melodies develop hidden counter-movements, while keyboards and sampled fragments appear inside the mixture without converting the music into conventional symphonic black metal. The production is raw, yet it is not empty. Its narrow, abrasive surface conceals a remarkable amount of activity.
That contradiction becomes one of the album’s principal pleasures. Ljuset can initially sound cheap and almost careless. The programmed drums are dry, guitars sometimes blur into a brittle midrange mass, and the voice appears to have been recorded with little concern for conventional balance. Repeated listening reveals how precisely those elements have been arranged. A melody partly buried during one passage may return in clearer form later; an accompanying guitar can quietly change the emotional meaning of the dominant riff; a keyboard line may add brightness without reducing the surrounding desolation. The record does not reward attention by exposing technical polish. It reveals additional instability.
Woods of Infinity’s melodic language draws heavily from folk forms, but not from the heroic or pastoral style frequently attached to Scandinavian metal. These themes often have a crooked, itinerant quality, turning through unexpected notes while remaining immediately memorable. At moments, the band resembles a village ensemble playing too quickly and through the wrong equipment. Melkor takes the circular motion of a folk dance and subjects it to repetition, distortion and rhythmic rigidity. The result can sound celebratory and lifeless at once: music whose body remembers dancing even after its emotional reason has vanished.
“Ett förlorat barn,” meaning “A Lost Child,” demonstrates how uncomfortable that ambiguity can become. Its melodic content carries traces of innocence, but the sound surrounding it is cold and damaged. Woods of Infinity does not merely place a sad lyric over mournful music. The band creates conflict between what the melody appears to remember and what the recording allows it to become. “Tankeväckande självömkan”—roughly “Thought-Provoking Self-Pity”—pushes the contradiction further. Even the title questions whether suffering is profound or merely indulgent. This is depressive music with enough distance to examine its own performance of despair.
That distance separates Ljuset from the more standardized depressive black metal that would become increasingly common later in the decade. Ravenlord does not present himself as a solitary figure dissolving into pure anguish. His delivery is confrontational, literary and frequently grotesque. He forces long lines into spaces that do not seem designed to hold them, producing the sensation of a monologue continuing while the music follows an unrelated internal logic. The voice can sound desperate, contemptuous or absurd, occasionally within the same passage. It refuses the listener the comfort of a single, sincere emotional posture.
The lyrics are essential to Woods of Infinity’s reputation and also the reason many listeners reject the band. They move among death, spiritual disgust, sexuality, childhood, self-loathing, provocation and intentionally offensive humor. Some texts are disturbing in ways that should not be softened into generic “darkness.” For listeners who do not understand Swedish, Ravenlord’s diction may register primarily as another extreme texture, concealing how specific and confrontational the words can be. That linguistic barrier has helped produce conflicting interpretations of the group as painfully sincere, sarcastic, nihilistic or merely determined to violate taste. Ljuset never resolves the question because instability of intent is part of its method.
“Summon the Lord of Blasphemy,” originally present on the 1999 Trollhämnd demo, links the album to the project’s primitive beginnings. Surrounded by the stranger writing of 2005, its direct black-metal language sounds almost like a traditional invocation recalled from another life. Yet Woods of Infinity refuses to present even this older material straightforwardly. The folk-shaped phrasing, processed atmosphere and Ravenlord’s peculiar relationship to rhythm make the track impossible to mistake for ordinary second-wave imitation. The band understands black metal’s basic vocabulary but speaks it with an accent nobody else possesses.
The middle of Ljuset increases the density rather than dividing the album with an ambient pause. “A Love Story” carries an almost deceptively simple title, while “Tvåfaldig vikt är en styggelse för herren” borrows its phrase about false or double weights being an abomination to the Lord from the Swedish Bible. At more than eight minutes, the latter becomes one of the album’s most engulfing constructions. Layers accumulate without turning into a clean crescendo. Instead, the track seems to grow inward, placing melodic movement, vocal narration and raw texture into increasingly close quarters. The effect is claustrophobic despite the expansive length.
The biblical title is typical of the album’s approach to inherited language. Woods of Infinity uses religious phrases neither as straightforward belief nor as routine satanic reversal. Scripture becomes another unstable object that can be quoted, distorted or applied to human hypocrisy. A false balance is also an apt image for the music. Beautiful melody and ugly subject matter are deliberately given unequal weights; apparent sincerity is countered by mockery; musical warmth is undermined by the inhuman repetition of the percussion. Ljuset continually tips its scales without allowing either side to settle.
“Epigram” and “Metamorfos” bring the album’s more reflective tendencies forward, though reflection here does not mean calm. The guitar writing becomes increasingly hypnotic as small figures recur beneath Ravenlord’s crowded voice. “Metamorfos” is especially effective because transformation occurs through accumulation rather than obvious sectional changes. The material stays recognizably connected to its opening form while additional lines gradually make that form harder to perceive. Woods of Infinity’s density is never simply heaviness. It is a way of obscuring the route by which one state becomes another.
The cover of Edge of Sanity’s “Across the Fields of Forever” initially appears to be an unexpected progressive-death-metal reference, yet it belongs naturally within the sequence. Melkor and Ravenlord do not treat the song as an opportunity for faithful tribute or technical display. Its melancholy and forward-reaching melody are absorbed into the album’s thinner, harsher vocabulary. The cover reveals that Woods of Infinity’s influences extend beyond black metal and folk music, but more importantly, it shows how thoroughly the duo can impose its own proportions upon outside material. By this point, even a recognizable composition enters the same dislocated emotional climate.
“Kroppen var mitt fängelse”—“The Body Was My Prison”—serves as the original CD’s major closing statement. Its title condenses many of the album’s preoccupations: physical existence as confinement, identity as an unwanted structure and release imagined through disappearance. The piece is long enough for its melodies to become obsessive, but it retains movement beneath the repetition. Ravenlord’s vocal flood makes the track feel less like a funeral than a final argument conducted against the body itself. It is bleak without the stately pace or purified sorrow usually associated with depressive music.
The concluding “Eksynyt,” whose Finnish title means “Lost,” extends the ending into a separate state. The piece lets the record recede without suddenly purging its unease. Rather than resolving the preceding hour, it leaves the listener beyond its most verbal and densely layered regions, still surrounded by their residue. Its placement matters because Ljuset is a lengthy album—eleven tracks and slightly more than sixty-six minutes—and a conventional climax would make that duration feel too deliberately shaped. “Eksynyt” allows it to end as something abandoned rather than completed.
The original Total Holocaust Records CD appeared in October 2005. A 2006 gatefold double-LP added “En höst” and “Etwas besonderes im Sauna,” while a later cassette also included the latter piece. Those expansions suit a record already resistant to a single definitive boundary, but the original CD sequence has a severe internal arc: intoxicated opening, increasingly dense confrontation, transformation, borrowed song, imprisonment and loss. Its length is demanding, yet the variety inside its raw surface prevents it from becoming a uniform wall.
The title means “The Light,” which may seem ironic for an album so saturated with disgust and psychic enclosure. Yet light is present throughout the music. It appears in the upper guitar melodies, the strange folk turns and the flashes of almost childlike beauty that survive inside the distortion. Woods of Infinity does not use that brightness as redemption. Light exposes rather than heals. It illuminates details one might prefer to leave indistinct and makes the album’s ugliness harder to dismiss as theatrical shadow.
Ljuset remains powerful because it cannot be reduced to its provocations, its depressive atmosphere or its eccentricity. Its real achievement is the tension among all three. Melkor’s layered folk-derived writing creates beauty without consolation; Ravenlord’s vocals convert language into pressure without surrendering its specificity; the raw production makes the record initially impenetrable while preserving the details that reward return visits. Woods of Infinity produced a black-metal album that sounds emotionally damaged but compositionally alert, ridiculous at one moment and genuinely harrowing the next. The light it offers is cold, uneven and mercilessly revealing.
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