Botanist – I: The Suicide Tree/II: A Rose From The Dead (tUMULt Records)
Conventional wisdom dictates that there is really no creative endeavor that one can undertake which might be seen as genuinely new. Reviewing music for any amount of time generally confirms this, as even artists who seem to possess some radical angle with which they approach their craft tend to rely on some juxtaposition of influences, however incompatible they may seem at first. But every now and then, something comes from so far afield that it can be difficult to really grasp the strangeness at hand. The double-album debut by Botanist offers a good example of this latter type of artist.
To get some vague understanding of what Botanist's work entails, we must first look at a series of statements about the band. First, Botanist is a black metal project, at least in the broadest definition of the term, that of a descriptor which seems to encompass increasingly disparate artists' output. Second, the lyrics concern themselves, as one might expect based on the band's name, with flora and fauna. Third, the music is performed by one man on drums, vocals, and hammered dulcimer. Any of these elements might seem perfectly normal on their own, some might even combine with another without seeming too incongruous, but the three in conjunction make some of the strangest albums that has been released this year.
It may be a stretch to call this black metal (some genre purists would bristle, but they would likely have that reaction towards anything that doesn't sound like Burzum). The guitar has so long held a preeminent place in heavy music that its absence is more than a little bit disconcerting - it's fairly easy to take a distorted wall of sound for granted. There are certainly demonic vocals (somewhere between a traditional black metal shriek and the croaking intonations of a band like Inquisition) and blasting drums, both key black metal signifiers, but the use of hammered dulcimer as the sole melodic component can be something of an acquired taste. Whereas a good deal of black metal relies on a sort of droney buzz that results from so many instruments playing rapidly under a wash of distortion, the notes and rhythmic structure of the dulcimer are placed front and center. While each cascading overtone rings atop its predecessor until harmony and dissonance blend into a knotty tangle, the notes and melodies themselves are clearly audible. In its more mid-tempo moments, the melodic content can resemble the microtonal experiments of composers like Harry Partch, but the songs rarely break from rapid tempos long enough for these elements to shine through.
Lyrically, reflections on the natural world seem to take the foreground, and while these aren't necessarily unheard of in black metal (much of the Cascadian black metal scene, most notably the ever-divisive Wolves In The Throne Room, bears some inclination towards ecology, never mind the less agenda-driven meditations on nature put forth by black metal bands almost since the genre's inception), from what I can discern there are several thematic threads at work with Botanist's output. The most obvious is the emphasis on botany and botanical concerns. Almost every song title derives from the Latin name of some flora or fauna, with echinosereus, glycyrrhiza, and xanthostemon all afforded the sort of attention metal bands would normally only pay the devil himself. And while some of the lyrics read like some sort of interdisciplinary biology/poetry course (“The glory of the dawn / Photosynthesis miracle / Solitary bloom of peduncle long / Mallow weed bound” begins “Convolvulus Altheaoides”), there is a strong undercurrent of apocalyptic misanthropy. According to the artist himself, the Botanist project refers to an eponymous character, a scientist driven from human society's destructive impulses to live in nature, awaiting mankind's destruction and apparently communing with plants. According to a handful of interviews on Botanist's website, this scientist character is something of a fictionalized, extrapolated version of the artist himself. While he's not necessarily scurrying around the forest attempting to converse with fungi (from what I could discern at least), his disenchantment with humanity as a whole is a palpable driving force, and acts as the project's underlying current, tying together the fictional, the hypothetical, and the concrete.
Some of these concepts are spelled out bluntly, with the most explicit mentions of an agenda present in songs like “Euonymous In Darkness,” which features lines like “Contempt for all mankind / Sickness and plague upon those who would consume him / As winged beasts leer above.” That the song is titled after a deciduous shrub is perhaps easy to overlook (especially as its name bears a strong resemblance to that of a certain murdered metal musician), but the juxtaposition of an uncaring though ultimately just natural world and an ignorant and self-serving mankind is on full display. This isn't to suggest that the whole project is immured by the sort of bleakness normally present in black metal. For something described by its practitioner as “eco-terrorist black metal” (an interesting choice of nomenclature, especially since the last prominent band to claim such a title – Velvet Caccoon – turned out to be an elaborate ruse), the albums are a celebration of life even in the face of the adversity that is humanity. They even indulge in a few sly jokes – a practice almost unheard of in the genre – with titles like “Rhododendoom” and “Wings of Antichrys” (the latter featuring references to inverted chrysanthemums) imbuing the proceedings with a weird levity, a sort of dry humor that might fly over the heads of anybody who didn't pay attention in biology class.
But I think the “eco-terrorist” tag should be taken with the largest grain of salt possible since, from what I can tell, there's little in the way of a specific agenda present, with the songs instead favoring a narrative retreat into the wilderness and only the occasional reference to humanity's trespasses but never really a suggested change of course. Ultimately, until the CEOs of B.P., Shell, and Massey take up blastbeats and corpse paint, the world won't see any true eco-terrorist black metal – though the nihilism and wanton destruction those few companies have wrought puts all the church-burning and murder of actual black metal bands to shame. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the intent behind that particular description of Botanist, but it seems like a good example of how even the smallest element of an artist's aesthetic can introduce a pretension that does little to support a project's strengths.
And this debut by Botanist is certainly strong. Both sonically and conceptually challenging, it achieves what few metal bands can: the distinction of being truly unique. It's not a comfortable listen, and is decidedly not the standard version of metal that exists only to elicit a visceral reaction, but rather acts a rejection of normative measures, and attempts to demonstrate the standardization settled upon by even the most seemingly discordant and aggressive artists. Despite the misanthropic currents present throughout the album, it stands as a testament to humanity's better impulses – the pushing of boundaries, the rejection of conformity, and an awareness of life's interconnectedness.