Artist..: Yfel

Album...: Beneath the Mountain's Vigil

Genre...: Black Metal                | Label...: Fiadh Productions
Year....: 2023                       |

R.date..: 2023-12-21                 | S.date..: 2023-12-22

Source..: WEB (24bit)                | Encoder.: libFLAC
Bitrate.: 1751kbps avg.              | F.Rate..: 44.1kHz

http://play.qobuz.com/album/abcok13p8ni1b

Disc 1 / 1

01. All Fleas Carry the Souls of Men                                8:40
02. Battle of Blair Mountain                                       10:04
03. Protectors of the Tomb                                          6:30
04. The Father's Path                                               7:24
05. Eyes of the Moon                                                7:47

(531.14MB) 00:40:25

One of my favorite movies of all time is Matewan, the 1987 historical
drama directed by John Sayles. The film depicts the struggle of the coal
miners of Matewan, West Virginia as they form a union, go on strike, and
ultimately take up arms against the brutal tactics and hired goons of the
Stone Mountain Coal Company. The cast list is a who’s who of great
character actors: Chris Cooper in his first screen role, David Strathairn,
James Earl Jones, Mary McDonnell, Kevin Tighe, a teenaged Will Oldham. The
legendary Haskell Wexler’s cinematography was never better, and Sayles’
sharp-edged, leftist politics are front and center in every scene. Matewan
is also a great music film, with a dobro-heavy score by Mason Daring and
four songs by Hazel Dickens, the West Virginia bluegrass singer whose
protest songs made her a folk-world star in the ’60s and ’70s.
Dickens’ presence in Matewan isn’t a hollow gesture. Sayles is explicitly
invoking and adding to the age-old history of music in social movements,
especially labor movements. A decade before Matewan, Dickens contributed
music to Barbara Kopple’s searing coal-country documentary, Harlan County
USA. One of her songs for that film is called “Black Lung,” after the
disease that killed her brother. The personal, the political, and the
purely practical all mingle in coal miners’ music, and the Matewan
soundtrack understands that. Dickens understood that better than anybody.
Her songs for Matewan, from the defiant “Fire In The Hole” to the
devastating “Hills Of Galilee,” may technically be film music, but they’re
also etched into labor history.

On August 25, 1921, barely a year after the events of Matewan, the Battle
of Blair Mountain broke out in neighboring Logan County, West Virginia.
Ten thousand union miners marched against a coalition of coal mine
operators, strikebreakers, and private militiamen. It’s still the largest
and bloodiest labor uprising in American history, and President Warren G.
Harding eventually deployed the US Army to West Virginia to quell the last
flames of insurrection. A little over a century later, Columbus, Ohio’s
Yfel have immortalized the miners’ struggle in “Battle Of Blair Mountain,”
a towering, 10-minute firestorm of epic, atmospheric black metal. Hazel
Dickens probably wouldn’t know what to make of all the blastbeats and
screaming, but she’d sure as hell be proud of Yfel’s intent.

“Battle Of Blair Mountain” is the highlight of Beneath The Mountain’s
Vigil, Yfel’s first full-length, and it functions like an old union song.
Its lyrics, written by guitarist Ryan Atkins, are bracingly direct and
unburdened by metaphorical language. (There’s even a direct reference to
Matewan.) In true labor-anthem fashion, it calls back to an old event to
help illuminate a way into an uncertain future. The fist of corporate
greed that came down on the Blair Mountain miners is still coming down on
Amazon warehouse workers and Starbucks baristas. You can almost hear the
song’s final verse being chanted on a picket line: “Together we stand
united and strong/ Against those who would do us wrong.”

Atkins lives in Columbus now, but he grew up in rural Ohio just across the
West Virginia border, and coal mining runs in his family. Beneath The
Mountain’s Vigil is consequently fixated on coal as a lyrical subject.
Beyond “Blair Mountain,” there’s “Protectors Of The Tomb,” a song about
the companies who have tried to blow up old mountaintop cemeteries to get
at the coal underneath them. Coal put a lot of the men in those cemeteries
in their graves in the first place; for the captains of industry, that
apparently wasn’t enough. “The Father’s Path” is a devastating song about
the younger generation of miners making what feels like the only choice
available to them: “Sent into the caverns/ One thousand feet below/ It’s
what we know.”

Yfel started in 2021 as an offshoot of the melodic death metal band Gates
To The Abyss, but they don’t sound anything like them. Early in the
pandemic, Atkins, co-guitarist Drew Staggs, and drummer Chaz Frazer
started coming up with ideas that seemed to stretch beyond the scope of
Gates. They found themselves writing parts that were less about individual
riffs and more about creating an outsize atmosphere. Songs started getting
longer. The new music seemed to demand a new, more serious lyrical focus –
Gates had been a Lord Of The Rings-themed band – and the idea of exploited
labor and land in Appalachia soon emerged. Yfel’s self-produced debut EP,
2021’s Personification Of Chaos, was a promising opening salvo that hinted
at the ideas that now appear fully formed on Beneath The Mountain’s Vigil.

Atmospheric black metal is all about the sense of scale. If you want to
get deep into the subgenre weeds, that sense of scale is what separates it
from what’s become known as blackgaze. There’s a certain emotional
intimacy to Alcest, Deafheaven, and bands that have followed in their
wake. That’s not what Yfel are about. Their songs are mountains scraping
the heavens. The five tracks on Beneath The Mountain’s Vigil average eight
minutes apiece, and Yfel use that time to build out musical suites that
feel truly enormous. The emotions of the album aren’t dialed into
one-on-one connection; they’re about their own sheer immensity. There’s a
risk of chilly remoteness to that approach, and lesser atmospheric bands
end up making black metal wallpaper. Yfel have already figured out how to
avoid that trap. As huge as Beneath The Mountain’s Vigil feels, its focus
on coal country lends it a specificity that helps drive the songs home.

Yfel don’t venture too far outside of the tried-and-true formula for this
style of music. They don’t really need to. The tremolo-picked riffs,
mournful melodies, acoustic breaks, wind-tunnel drumming, and throaty
howls of classic black metal suit their purposes well. Within the confines
of that style, they find frequent opportunities for ecstatic expression.
One such moment is the acoustic guitar line on “All Fleas Carry The Souls
Of Men” that arrives to escort the icy main riff out of the song.
(Darkthrone pull off a similar move on “In The Shadow Of The Horns,”
possibly the greatest black metal song of all time, and that passage on
“Fleas” feels like a deliberate nod.) Later, on “The Father’s Path,” a
clean vocal part cuts through the haze of riffs, reorienting the song
around its doleful melody. Chaz Frazer, the album’s quiet MVP, peppers his
blasting drum patterns with lively fills that keep the band on their toes.
Beneath The Mountain’s Vigil’s songs are all long and true to genre, but
they’re not monolithic or, heaven forbid, boring.

The epic sound works to reinforce the album’s strong thematic center. Yfel
make the struggle of the coal miner – and the laborer, more generally –
sound like the most urgent, important fight in the world. Black metal is a
powerful sound that’s been co-opted by plenty of knuckleheads over the
years. Beneath The Mountain’s Vigil refuses to be apolitical (or worse).
Instead, it’s an urgent rallying cry for what Yfel’s kindred spirits in
Ashenspire would call “the Great Many.” Fans of Panopticon’s 2012
bluegrass-and-black-metal masterpiece Kentucky will likely hear echoes of
that album in what Yfel are doing here. (Vigil was mixed and mastered by
Spenser Morris, who has been Panopticon’s go-to engineer for years.) Both
albums use the vast scale of atmospheric black metal to revive the
union-song tradition and shine a light on the oft-forgotten plight of the
coal miner. But the line goes back to Hazel Dickens, and to Woody Guthrie
before her, and even further back, to any working person who has ever sung
out for what they deserve. What Yfel achieve on Beneath The Mountain’s
Vigil isn’t new. It’s merely the latest chapter in an ancient, hallowed
tradition.

ixxu!imp