Woods Of Infinity - 2005 - Hej Då

 

Total Holocaust Records – THR-88  313.46MB FLAC

Hej då means goodbye, but Woods of Infinity does not deliver the word with clean closure. There is no firm door shutting between one life and another, no dignified farewell followed by silence. The album inhabits the unstable period after departure has been announced but before the emotional debris has settled. Affection, disgust, childhood memory, coldness, ridicule, sexual unease, sentimentality, and hatred remain tangled together, refusing to separate into morally convenient rooms. Woods of Infinity makes black metal from that tangle. The music is raw enough to feel damaged, melodic enough to become intimate, and strange enough that intimacy never becomes safe.

The duo’s method is immediately recognizable but difficult to classify precisely. Melkor’s guitars and programmed drums establish the black-metal skeleton, yet the songs rarely behave with the ceremonial severity expected from the form. Riffs can sound mournful, triumphant, awkward, naïve, or deliberately overripe, sometimes within the same passage. Ravenlord’s vocals move even more unpredictably, shifting among shrieks, whispers, muttering, wounded cries, deranged laughter, and voices that resemble private characters escaping from an internal theatre. The production leaves everything slightly exposed and unbalanced. Instead of correcting the instability, Woods of Infinity treats it as the album’s emotional truth.

“Rationen krymprygg” opens without politely introducing the world to follow. Its compact duration gives it the feeling of a grotesque little doorway, a fragment whose meaning may be clear to the people inside the song but remains deliberately crooked to everyone else. The music already refuses the ordinary heroic posture of black metal. There is grandeur in the guitars, but it is continually compromised by vocal behaviour too uncomfortable, comic, or vulnerable to preserve a majestic mask. Woods of Infinity understands that ugliness can become more disturbing when it retains traces of play.

“Köld,” simply “Cold,” might appear to promise a familiar black-metal landscape, but the cold here is psychological rather than geographical. It is the temperature produced when closeness fails, when affection remains present but can no longer reach its object cleanly. The guitar melodies carry genuine sorrow, while the voice resists becoming a noble sufferer. Ravenlord sounds needy, hostile, theatrical, frightened, and mocking, sometimes all at once. This is not the purified loneliness of a solitary figure standing above a frozen valley. It is the messier cold of being trapped beside one’s own memories.

“Under färden,” “During the Journey,” expands that condition into movement. Travel ordinarily suggests progress, but Woods of Infinity makes the route feel circular. The guitars advance while the emotional situation returns repeatedly to the same damaged center. Samples and vocal interruptions create the sensation that other times are leaking into the present, as though the journey cannot proceed without carrying every previous room, relationship, humiliation, and desire along with it. The track’s length allows melancholy to become strangely immersive, yet the band never lets atmosphere settle into harmless beauty.

“Kärlek och vänskap,” “Love and Friendship,” places two of the most reassuring human ideas inside a record that distrusts reassurance. Woods of Infinity does not attack love because love is weak. The music is disturbing because love possesses enormous power and can become entangled with dependency, jealousy, memory, fantasy, and harm. Friendship can protect people, but it can also provide the language through which boundaries become confused or betrayal becomes possible. The song’s melodic tenderness is genuine, which makes its surrounding discomfort more difficult to dismiss as mere provocation. Something precious is being handled badly, and the listener is left close enough to notice.

“Piskar ut mitt hat,” roughly “Whipping Out My Hate,” converts private emotion into physical action. The phrasing is intentionally excessive, almost adolescent in its desire to make hatred visible and bodily. Yet the song’s force comes from the suspicion that hatred may be grief wearing protective equipment. Woods of Infinity repeatedly places aggression beside wounded sentiment, allowing each to expose the other. The harsher the declaration becomes, the more clearly one hears the emotional dependence beneath it. Hatred cannot stop circling what supposedly deserves rejection.

“En förgången tid,” “A Bygone Time,” is the album’s broadest and most emotionally ambitious movement. Its extended form gives the melodies enough space to acquire the scale of memory rather than ordinary composition. A bygone time is never recovered accurately. It survives through selected images, repeated stories, shame, nostalgia, and details that may become more vivid after their original context has disappeared. The track sounds almost triumphant at moments, but the triumph belongs to memory’s power, not to the life being remembered. The past wins because the present cannot prevent it from returning.

“Det som hände,” “What Happened,” follows with a title so plain that it becomes ominous. The phrase suggests an event too central to ignore but too difficult, shameful, or unstable to name directly. What happened? The album does not provide a dependable account. Instead, it demonstrates how recollection changes under emotional pressure. Voices multiply, textures blur, and musical beauty coexists with the sense that something remains profoundly wrong. The listener receives atmosphere rather than testimony, which means interpretation must remain cautious. Woods of Infinity creates a disturbed perspective, not an objective record of events.

Then comes Barry Manilow’s “Old Songs,” one of the strangest cover choices in black metal and one of the clearest statements of the duo’s purpose. The original song concerns old music awakening memories of love, exactly the sentimental mechanism operating throughout Hej då. Woods of Infinity does not cover it merely as a joke or an act of genre desecration. They reveal the darkness already present in extreme nostalgia. An old song can return a lost person with terrifying immediacy, reopen an emotional period thought to be finished, or make an invented past feel more real than the present. By forcing Manilow’s sentiment through their damaged black-metal language, the duo shows that easy-listening tenderness and underground despair may be feeding upon the same human weakness.

The cover also punctures the expectation that black metal must defend itself from softness. Woods of Infinity is willing to appear ridiculous because ridicule is one of the risks of emotional honesty. The performance does not wink safely at the audience and return to seriousness afterward. It allows the sentimental song to alter the album’s balance. Once “Old Songs” has passed through, the preceding melodies sound even more openly nostalgic, while the band’s supposed perversity begins to resemble a malformed response to ordinary needs for affection, remembrance, and connection.

“Sakrament” closes the record by giving those needs a ritual form. A sacrament turns material action into a carrier of invisible meaning. Water, bread, wine, touch, confession, or repeated words become more than their physical ingredients because a community agrees that transformation has occurred. Woods of Infinity makes its own damaged sacrament from distortion, memory, taboo, cheap programming, melodic beauty, and a voice unwilling to remain socially presentable. The ceremony offers no purification. It consecrates contradiction.

The album’s controversial lyrical reputation cannot be ignored, but neither should it become a carnival banner replacing the music. Woods of Infinity repeatedly approaches subjects involving sexuality, childhood, violated innocence, emotional dependency, and grotesque fantasy. The value of confronting such material depends upon what the confrontation reveals. Hej då is strongest when its ugliness exposes the unstable border between tenderness and possession, or shows how memory and desire can become corrupted. It is weakest when provocation threatens to turn another person’s vulnerability into scenery for transgression. The discomfort should remain active rather than being neutralized through either censorship or collector admiration.

What ultimately distinguishes Hej då is the absence of a clean position from which to judge its narrator. The voice is not a trustworthy confessor, heroic villain, detached storyteller, or uncomplicated victim. It is an unstable bundle of impulses attempting to turn private confusion into music. That instability does not excuse anything suggested by the record, but it prevents the songs from functioning as simple declarations. The listener enters a psyche where love can become threat, comedy can become self-protection, nostalgia can become imprisonment, and beauty can appear in places where one would rather not encounter it.

The goodbye announced by the title therefore feels less like farewell to a person than farewell to an earlier artistic self. Woods of Infinity keeps the crude emotional immediacy of its earlier work while allowing melody, memory, and compositional ambition to grow around it. The result is neither polished nor mature in the reassuring sense. It is more dangerous because the band has become capable of making its disorder beautiful.

Hej då ends without assuring us that whatever happened has been understood, forgiven, or left behind. Old songs remain capable of opening old rooms. Love and friendship retain their shadows. The cold has entered the journey, and the past keeps singing from inside the distortion. Goodbye is spoken, but Woods of Infinity already knows that certain things do not leave merely because language tells them to go.