Arson opens as though the fire began years ago and nobody noticed until the roof finally gave way. “Fire, Walk With Me” does not creep toward ignition. Guitars arrive in bright, surging layers while Kerim “Krimh” Lechner’s drums push the song forward with the momentum of someone running through rain toward a place already burning. J.J.’s voice enters as a torn scream from inside that motion, raw enough to suggest immediate crisis but controlled enough to remain part of the composition. Harakiri for the Sky’s black metal has always been emotional, but Arson enlarges emotion until it becomes architecture.
The Austrian duo had already established its central method across three earlier albums. M.S. writes and performs the instrumental material, building long songs from tremolo guitar, post-rock crescendos, hardcore urgency and depressive black-metal atmosphere. J.J. supplies the lyrics and vocals, approaching grief, addiction, suicide, memory and personal collapse without the distancing imagery of medieval forests or satanic ceremony. Arson does not reinvent that method. It pushes it toward maximum scale.
The album contains eight tracks and runs for more than seventy minutes. Most songs last between eight and eleven minutes, giving every riff enough time to return, gather emotional weight and eventually become something larger than its first appearance. This can be exhausting. Arson does not believe every idea should be stated once and left alone. It believes repetition is how pain proves it has not gone anywhere.
“Fire, Walk With Me” borrows its title from Twin Peaks, but the song does not use the reference as decorative darkness. Fire in the series is corruption, desire, trauma and transformation, a force that moves through people rather than merely destroying buildings. Harakiri for the Sky treats it similarly. The guitar melodies blaze upward while J.J. sounds less like someone observing the flames than someone asking them to finish what they started.
M.S.’s guitar writing is immediately recognizable. One line establishes the emotional horizon, another thickens it with chords, and a higher melody rises over the rhythm like light breaking through smoke. The music is openly beautiful, sometimes almost triumphant, but the beauty never confirms survival. It creates the cruel sensation of hope appearing at the exact moment hope has become least credible.
“The Graves We’ve Dug” begins from the understanding that ruin is often self-constructed. The title does not blame an external enemy. These graves have been prepared through repeated choices, habits, silence and damage accumulated across time. The song’s faster sections carry urgency, while the slower passages feel like recognition arriving too late.
Harakiri for the Sky’s relationship with post-rock is especially clear here. The band uses gradual expansion, repeating guitar figures and large crescendos, but removes the clean emotional uplift that often accompanies those techniques. A crescendo does not necessarily mean transcendence. It may simply mean the feeling has become too large to remain contained.
“You Are the Scars” stretches beyond ten minutes and turns injury into identity. A scar proves that a wound closed, but it also keeps the wound visible. The title addresses another person as the lasting mark itself, collapsing memory, love and harm into one body.
The song circles its central melodic figures with almost obsessive patience. J.J.’s vocal performance becomes increasingly desperate while the guitars remain strangely radiant. That contrast is the album’s defining sound. The instruments seem capable of reaching open sky, while the voice remains trapped in whatever happened below.
Krimh’s drumming prevents these long structures from dissolving into decorative atmosphere. His blast beats are sharp and forceful, but the performance is most effective during transitions. Cymbal movement, tom patterns and changing kick rhythms give the repeated guitar sections different physical meanings each time they return. The same melody can feel like pursuit, collapse or exhausted continuation depending upon what the drums place beneath it.
“Heroin Waltz” uses one of the album’s most immediately striking titles. A waltz suggests formal elegance, rotation and controlled movement in three. Heroin suggests chemical escape, dependency and bodily deterioration. The combination turns addiction into a dance whose steps are learned through repetition until stopping becomes more difficult than continuing.
The track does not literally remain inside a waltz rhythm. Instead, its sections rise and fall with a circular feeling, repeatedly carrying the listener back toward the same emotional center. Guitar lines reach toward sweetness while the vocals tear through them. The beauty becomes inseparable from the mechanism causing harm.
Harakiri for the Sky is often grouped with depressive suicidal black metal, but Arson differs from the genre’s most skeletal forms. The production is broad and muscular. The drums sound physically present. The guitars are layered with enough clarity to preserve melodic detail, and the songs build toward large climaxes rather than withdrawing into lo-fi isolation.
The depression here is not represented by musical weakness. It is represented by energy that cannot locate a useful destination. The songs run, climb and erupt, but every path eventually returns to grief.
“Tomb Omnia” is one of the record’s darkest pieces. Its title suggests a tomb containing everything, or everything itself becoming a tomb. The song moves with a heavier, more funereal weight, allowing the guitars to darken without abandoning melody.
The track is connected to suicide and the damage left among those who survive it. Harakiri for the Sky does not romanticize death as pure release. The music remains among the living, where absence becomes a permanent object around which family memory reorganizes itself. The tomb is not limited to the grave. It expands into every room still occupied by people who remember.
“Stillborn” continues the album’s vocabulary of failed emergence. A stillborn life reaches the threshold of existence without crossing it. The word can also describe plans, relationships and identities that ended before they had the chance to become complete.
The song begins with a restrained guitar figure before widening into one of Arson’s most powerful surges. J.J.’s voice sounds especially exposed, carrying less rage than helplessness. The music repeatedly gathers enough force to suggest rebirth, then falls back into the knowledge contained by the title.
This pattern risks predictability. By the album’s second half, the listener understands how many songs will move: melodic opening, acceleration, vocal anguish, repeated central figure, large crescendo and exhausted release. Arson does not always justify every minute of its length. Certain sections repeat after their emotional point has already landed.
Yet that excess also belongs to the record’s psychology. Grief does not become concise because concision would improve the composition. Intrusive thought repeats after its meaning is understood. Addiction returns after consequences are obvious. A person can rehearse the same memory for years without discovering a new ending.
“Voidgazer” turns that compulsive attention toward emptiness itself. To gaze into the void is a familiar philosophical image, but the song makes the act feel less heroic. The void does not reveal hidden wisdom. It becomes another object of fixation.
The track’s guitar melodies are among the album’s most open and skyward, creating the sensation of enormous distance. J.J.’s voice cuts across them from a far narrower emotional space. He may be gazing outward, but the sound suggests that the void has already moved inside.
The album’s cover reinforces this relationship between beauty and destruction. A woman stands before an immense burning landscape, her body dark against orange light. The image could be read as witness, survivor, arsonist or intended sacrifice. There is no visible action confirming which role belongs to her.
That ambiguity suits the record. Fire may destroy the source of pain, but it also destroys shelter. It can purify, expose, erase or spread beyond control. The figure on the cover does not flee. She stands close enough to become part of the event.
“Manifesto” closes the album in less than five minutes, practically a miniature by Arson’s standards. It is a cover of a song by the Austrian crust-punk band Graveyard Rodeo, and its directness cuts through the preceding hour of extended emotional structures.
The track carries a rougher punk momentum, with fewer atmospheric detours and a clearer sense of confrontation. Ending with a cover prevents the album from resolving entirely inside its own grief. After seven long songs of internal combustion, Harakiri for the Sky reaches outward toward another band’s language and lets collective anger replace solitary collapse.
The cover also exposes the hardcore skeleton beneath the group’s music. Beneath the post-rock crescendos and black-metal tremolo, Harakiri for the Sky relies upon the emotional directness of punk. The songs do not hide their wounds behind elaborate mythology. They name scars, graves, heroin, stillbirth and emptiness with almost embarrassing clarity.
That directness will repel listeners who prefer black metal to maintain distance through symbol and atmosphere. Arson offers very little protection from feeling. Its lyrics can become melodramatic, and its guitar melodies repeatedly reach for overwhelming emotional release. The album would rather risk excess than disguise what it is trying to express.
M.S. occasionally pushes that melodic language close to repetition across songs. Certain chord movements and high guitar lines resemble earlier Harakiri for the Sky material, and the album’s enormous duration makes those similarities more visible. Arson is not a record of constant reinvention.
It is instead a record of refinement through endurance. The duo has found a narrow emotional mechanism and keeps testing how much weight it can carry. On the strongest tracks, the answer is considerable. Guitar, drums and voice move together until private anguish takes on the scale of weather.
Arson’s title names deliberate destruction rather than accidental fire. Somebody begins an arson fire for revenge, concealment, pleasure, protest or escape. The act transforms emotion into an event that cannot be withdrawn once released.
The album behaves the same way. Each song begins with a wound and keeps adding oxygen. Melodies brighten, drums accelerate and J.J.’s voice pushes beyond ordinary speech until the feeling has consumed the available space.
There is no calm survey of the ashes at the end. “Manifesto” leaves the record with fists still moving. Arson does not cure the despair it describes or convert suffering into wisdom. It gives despair an enormous burning structure, walks directly into it and keeps playing until the walls fall.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.