Tuesday 10 May 2011

#048 - Jute Gyte - Verstiegenheit

Another "free" one I found (the minimum donation being $0.00, which makes me feel rather stingy to not have paid) is the creation of a black-metal solo-artist Adam Kalmbach. "Verstiegenheit" meaning "Extravagance" in German. The band, however, is from the USA. Jute Gyte is an experimental take on the black-metal style, but still nods towards the black metal roots.


The album bursts straight into a full blown blast-wave of sound, with the first track "Gates of Day and Night", in which the artists style becomes immediately apparent, and the experimental aspects of the work immediately rear their heads. Aside from playing fast, ferocious and immersing black metal, with a fantastic scream which I've not heard equaled often, the traditional areas of the music are backed up with an underlying guitar-wail which evokes the sound that staring into the void would make, if, that is, staring made a noise. The following track, an eleven minute behemoth, also carries this ferocious air, but then subsides, into some melancholy, slower paced stuff, with truly savage screaming woven through it. Throughout the album, there are some truly innovative and fascinating musical arrangements, such as eerie oscillating tones, which cannot fail to cause pleasure as I listen to them, and which make me ponder why the band is not better known.

Adam Kalmbach, the man behind the work, is, from what I gather, originally a composer of electronic, noise music type material, which, despite my pitiful ignorance of, has definitely influenced the albums experimental sound, in many ways, especially in terms of the way it is arranged. In songs such as "The Light That Hangs Above the Fields", the heavy work immediately, without warning, collapses in upon itself, into a soft, creepy sounding parts, broken by vocals equally as harsh as those sung during the heavy parts, which is something which I haven't heard before. When I got over the initial bizarreness of the contrast, it sounded very effective, and all aspects, both heavy and soft, are complimented excellently by the albums production values, which are right in the middle - neither over nor under produced.


I'll not lie, some of the aspects of the album take a while to get used to. The softness mixed with the screaming, especially, was initially rather grating, but with time, it grew on me. It's sheer originality, or at least, as far as I know, originality, is impressive, as is the album as a whole, and is very much appreciable. I'd go as far as to say that this is the best one-man-black-metal project I've encountered after Burzum.

I give this 9/10.

Links:
Jute Gyte on Myspace
Jute Gyte on Bandcamp (With downloads)
Jute Gyt on Metal Archives