Mortiis – The Smell of Rain
Genre: Darkwave (or something)
Year: 2001
Year I discovered it: 2003
I was deep into my metal phase as a teen when a couple of my
friends introduced me to this offbeat gothic album by a troll-looking guy named
Mortiis from Norway, who used to be in a metal band once upon a time but then
made weird medieval ambient music for many years, until suddenly releasing this. And I was hooked in spite of my
leanings at the time. The lyrics speak to me to this very day in a way few
other albums have. I relate to it just as much today as ever. Mortiis evolved
into an industrial metal band later on, but although I've liked all of his
albums to a degree, none of them top The Smell of Rain. I first heard it
in 2003 and the songs still stay with me. It planted the seeds for my
transition into Industrial, darkwave and genres like that.
The album starts with the track “Parasite God”. I love
the image of flying above the mountains, watching all the tiny people “obey
themselves away”, sacrificing themselves to the bringer of hunger and the one
who drowned the world. It’s about how humanity pledges loyalty to higher beings
that don’t give a single crap about them. Who exactly is the “parasite God”? It
could be referring to the biblical God, that would be the easy answer of
course, but it could just as easily be referring to something less abstract.
Think of a corporate bootlicker who works for a company for twenty years and
has undying loyalty to them, only to be canned and replaced with little notice
when the company relocates to the Philippines or India for cheaper labor. It’s
like that. I think of some of my sad, dead-inside former coworkers who'd been working at the same call center for more than ten years. Perhaps corporations are the parasite God. Or is it money? “Bringer
of hunger, the one that drowned the world”. Capitalistic greed will be
responsible for famines and the drowning of the world once the ice caps melt.
Perhaps that’s what Mortiis was predicting.
“Mental Maelstrom” is a song I tend to associate, at
least to me personally, the loss of Western Armenia to Turkey. “The cities I
have built, the forests that I grew, have been stained by your filth and now
they smell like you. You STINK! JUST! LIKE! The pig you are.” Our ancestral
lands have been appropriated, city names changed from Armenian to Turkic names,
Turkish flags flown over our castles and fortresses, the names of our mountains
changed from Armenian to Turkish names, our history erased and rewritten to
suit the occupiers, who deny our civilization even existed before they arrived
here and stole it and committed a genocide. Now our land stinks like them.
Stained by their filth. “How far are you willing to go” to cover up history, to
cover up the truth, to cover up what vile deeds the world knows you did? Then
there’s the lyric to consider; “I want to be the end of everything you’ve ever
done.” Such a wrathful thing to say. I love it. “I have seen the devil’s eye,
and it is you.” The devil’s eye is in the Turkish flag.
I know this is
nothing Mortiis envisioned when he wrote the song, on some foggy mountain
overlooking a misty fjord in Norway, but everyone can look at the same thing
and see something different from their own unique perspective. A mountain can
look different from the east or from the west, but it’s the same mountain, and
no angle it is observed from is incorrect. A Native American could listen to
this song and easily make the same observations I did, only liken it to what
happened to their ancestral land in America. And that would be just as valid of
an interpretation. It’s a song about the oppressors from the viewpoint of the
oppressed.
The
next song is “Spirit in a Vacuum”, featuring the beautiful voice of one Sara
Jezebel Deva. She also sang on Covenant’s Nexus Polaris, and on several
Cradle of Filth albums. She’s the diva of black metal. Always there to contrast
the gravelly voice of the singer, to offer the yin to the yang of the song,
injecting it with just a little bit of light energy that a song still needs to
be catchy and good, as dark as the song is. The only female metal singer even
better than she is is Liv Christine from Theatre of Tragedy. But she’s in a
league of her own, no one matches that, it’s unfair to compare anyone’s voice
to hers; that perfect sirensong that would lure me to my own demise if it
wanted to. Ah, off-topicness. Sorry. Anyway, Sara Jezebel Deva has a beautiful
voice all her own. As for the lyrics, I can’t really comprehend them that well.
I haven’t made many attempts to do so though. He says “Mental Maelstrom” in the
song which always made me mix the song titles up in my mind. Threw me off. “Spirit
in a Vacuum” is a pretty cool concept though. If the stars have their own
spirits, as I like to think they do, then they are spirits in a vacuum. Woah. I
never thought of it that way before writing about it. Maybe this song is too
deep for me to comprehend at the moment. I’m but a speck in the cosmos. The
planet I live on is the speck. I’m less than a speck by that much.
The
next song is “Monolith”. The lyrics here are so interesting. “Go away from me,
I just want to flee. The God I used to be fills me no more with glee.” A
godlike figure who failed their followers, lingering on in shame. Not even
wanting to be addressed as such anymore. It makes me think of a long-forgotten
God watching over their lands as all their followers have been forced to convert
to another faith, like Christianity or Islam. Like the sphinx being swallowed
by the sands of time. A crumbling statue, falling apart in a dark, forgotten,
dusty underground tomb, waiting for centuries, millennia, eons, the only hope
of ever seeing the light of day again resting with some archaeologist who has
forgotten everything about the civilization you once looked after, eventually
digging you up, dusting you off, and putting you in a museum so that you can be
gawked at by foreign slack-jawed simpletons who have no idea the power you once
wielded. But you may have a brief shimmer of joy when one of those guests looks
at you, and actually knows you, feels your energy, knows how much power you
once had, understands it, even if they don’t know the whole story. I try to be
that person whenever I am at a museum. Someone who, even if they don’t know
everything, understands.
“You
Put a Hex on Me” seems a bit more playful than the other songs on the album thus
far. I don’t feel like Mortiis was saying anything particularly deep or
meaningful in this song, although the description of the Voodoo ritual is interesting.
“Why do you rattle all them bones”, “somebody’s blood is on the ground”. I don’t
know how much a Norwegian troll would know about Voodoo, but that’s out of my
hands I suppose. That’s neither here nor there. I know real Vodou has very
little to do with the fictional Voodoo we see on TV, like the Voodoo that
brought the Chucky doll to life in the movie Child’s Play. That’s just
silly fun, not the actual religion of Vodou, which is dark, mysterious, and
not well-known to outsiders. It’s not my culture, they can have it. I respect
it from a distance.
Then, in somewhat of a mood
whiplash, we get the song “Everyone Leaves”. A song about sheer loneliness.
Looking back to a time when the singer wasn’t lonely, but took it all for
granted. Everyone’s gone, and you can’t believe it. You didn’t see it coming. A
disaster occurred, and although you escaped, they weren’t able to get out in
time. This song always brings to my mind that documentary show that used to be
on The History Channel, Life After People. The sight of crumbling
buildings, still standing a century or more after the people that built it
completely disappeared under mysterious and unexplained circumstances. See the
show was about what would happen to the world if humans just suddenly
disappear. They never explain how, we don’t know if it was a nuclear war, a
great plague, or a zombie apocalypse that wipes out humanity. The show just
assumes humans vanished in an instant. And the world we built lingers on for
centuries, before crumbling, being buried, and gradually destroyed as if it
never existed. “It doesn’t matter how hard you hold on.” Everyone leaves
eventually, no matter how hard you hold on. It seems to also be a song about
growing older, as one by one your family members die off until you’re the only
one left. The only one left in the world who remembers them at all. It doesn’t
matter how hard you hold onto something. It will always be lost eventually. Nothing
lasts forever. Not even the universe itself. It doesn’t matter if you hold on
as hard as the universe holds onto its own existence, not even something as
infinite as the universe is able to prevent change, to prevent its own
demise. Change is inevitable. Change is
the strongest force in existence. Death waits for no one. Holding on to others
is futile. It will not delay the reaper. The best thing you can do is accept
death, because there is no way to prevent it. I have a memory of exploring
abandoned, decaying old buildings in the retired military base my old college,
California State University Monterey Bay, was built over. I brought a sharpie,
and scrawled the lyrics to this song on the walls of one of the bunkers. That
building is no longer standing, having been demolished. It encapsulates this
song perfectly.
“Marshlands” is a profound
observation of the world we live in. Of the machine. The machine of society,
the machine of capitalism. “Nothing that I say or do, matters to the big
machine. Nothing that I think or feel matters to the big machine. If I’m dead when
tomorrow’s gone, the big machine will just move on.” You are but a number, a
statistic, to the ones in charge when you work for a big corporation. You are
measured by your productivity, by how many calls you can take per hour, by how
few bathroom breaks you can take, by how much money you can make for the CEO,
the boss. If you are not being productive enough, they will fire you and
replace you, like changing the faulty gear on a machine. The machine must be
kept running smoothly. If there is a defective part in the machine, it is
replaced. Defective parts are simply discarded. Homeless people are defective
parts in the machine of capitalism, and are thus discarded without a thought.
Without sympathy or empathy. The machine is unfeeling. You are just a number.
If you quit, if you die, the machine will just move on. No one cares. “I have
been here far too long, in this lonesome twisted land.” That’s what I feel
about living in this lonesome, twisted country. I’ve been here too long in a
country ruled by the machine in such a way. I want to leave. Nothing I think or
feel matters to the machine, after all. I’m just a speck living on a speck. I
am a defective part in the machine. If not for luck I would easily be homeless
and living in the streets. I seem to have landed in a fortunate position after
I was discarded. I won’t be going into the furnace with the other defective parts.
I’ve landed somewhere safe. Until the person who discards the parts comes
looking for me and throws me into the furnace by hand. That’s inevitable one
day, I just hope it’s a long time before that happens.
“Antimental” is the next song. “Is
this damnation?” Is life some kind of damnation, a punishment for our souls? Is
being placed on Earth a punishment? Having to endure such a cruel and harsh
place until we eventually die of something at some point or another? Life is
suffering, the Buddha agrees with me on that. Perhaps this planet is Hell. We
can have some joy and pleasure, but it always has to be at the expense of
someone else’s suffering. We have the comfort of warm clothes in the winter,
sewn together by aching overworked hands in a sweatshop in China or somewhere.
We have food to eat at the expense of the aching backs of immigrants who work
to pick the fruits. It’s the same, just the same no matter what economic system
you have. Even in the caveman days. Every time you have a pleasure, someone
else has a pain. If you want food, you have to kill a plant or animal. That’s
still true. And that is always going to be true as long as there is life in the
universe somewhere. That is just existence. Perhaps there are other universes
where things work a different way. They must be nice places. Not like this
punishment universe.
“Smell the Witch”. Ah, this song
always reminded me of The Wizard of Oz even before my recent Oz
obsession. “Are you dead when you are made of straw?” Mortiis had to have been
singing about Oz. The song is being sung by a paranoid Munchkin ten years after
Dorothy’s house crushed the Witch of the East. He was traumatized by the Witch
of the East and he just can’t believe she’s really dead. She has to be hiding
somewhere. She had so much power. There’s no way she would really be killed by
such a random house crushing. He can smell the witch. He must have been
captured and tortured by the witch at some point. He remembers her distinctive
smell, and when his PTSD kicks in from the experience, he still smells her, and
starts suspecting she’s around every corner and in every shadow, waiting to
jump out at him. There’s a creepy old house outside his village, and he
sometimes suspects she lives there. The smell won’t go away from his nostrils,
and it’s been ten years since the witch has been gone. “Are you dead if you are
made of straw?” What if the Scarecrow used to be this guy’s friend, and the
witch got angry and turned his friend into a straw scarecrow? Everyone assumed
he was dead when turned into this inanimate object. They even had a funeral for
him, and then put him up on the pole in the cornfield, figuring his final wish
would be to do something useful for them. But it turned out the scarecrow WAS
still alive. And before they could find out their friend was still alive as a
scarecrow he went off with Dorothy. He had no memory of before the witch turned
him into a scarecrow. But he was their friend. He used to be a munchkin. That munchkin
who sings this song still can’t believe the scarecrow stayed alive after being
transformed by the witch. Aren’t you dead when you are made of straw? Yes I
know this contradicts the origin story of the Scarecrow from Ruth Plumly
Thompson’s The Royal Book of Oz, but whatever. I am not sure if Ozma
would end up sending this traumatized munchkin to go live with the
Flutterbudgets. Maybe she was going to but his family said they would take care
of him. He’s not always like this, after all. He just has episodes.
Flutterbudgets are always like this, their episodes don’t end. So Ozma let him
stay in Munchkin Country as long as he wasn’t bothering anyone. But every once
in a while, he’ll run through the streets of the Munchkin village and scream
that he still smells the witch. His family has to capture him, tackle him down,
and bring him home to try to calm him down when he has one of his PTSD episodes
again about the witch still being alive.
I’m so off topic now. Haha! “Smell
the Witch" is like the last real song on the album. After that, on my copy at
least, we get a bunch of remixes. I haven’t
listened to them in years, but I decided to listen to them while writing this
review. “Paranoid God” is a remix of “Parasite God”. I like this remix, it has
thunder and lightning in it and such. It’s a good version depending on what
mood you want to set for your mix tape. I don’t really like the other remixes
on the album. They’re weird. I like the original versions better. It just doesn’t
sound good. The remix of “Marshlands” is gonna be a no for me. I don’t like it
at all. I think its rare for a remix to
be better than the original of a song in general. Really rare. I mean I can
probably think of some that are, but they’re super rare. The “Monolith Dub”
remix is interesting. It sets a mood. Might be pretty cool as background music,
but not as music you actually sit and listen to. Like if I ran my own kratom
bar or something I might play this song as background noise for the patrons.
But as for laying in bed with my headphones on listening to music, this song is
too long and boring for that. Not that it’s necessarily bad, but like I said,
it has its situations where it works better than others. Then we have a curious and very noisy screaming
remix of “You Put a Hex On Me”. Like is this even the same song anymore? It sounds
nothing like the song its supposed to be a remix of. It’s just a bunch of noise.
What an insult to the original song. How do you listen to a song and decide “heehyuck!
I’m gonna make a remix herpaderpadoo!” and shit out noise like this? Why did
Mortiis let them do this? Did he owe them a favor or something?
And
what a crappy way to end such an astounding album that changed my life and I
still listen to today. Nah to me it ends with “Small the Witch”, I turn the CD
off before it gets to the remix section when I listen to this album. I wasn’t
listening to anything else like this back in 2003, and now it sounds as fresh
as like it could have come out today. It’s hard to really put it in a genre
though, it has such a unique sound to it. And it’s the only Mortiis album that
sounds like this. After this album he started making heavy music, which I still
like but for different reasons. I’m not upset that he changed his sound, the
thing I admire about Mortiis is he just does whatever the hell he wants, he
doesn’t care if he’s going to get criticized for changing up his style, he just
does it. He makes whatever the hell he feels like making. And that’s how I want
to be from now on. I want to be like Mortiis. That Norwegian troll is my damn
hero. He can make dark ambient, he can be a goth, he can make metal, he does
whatever the hell he wants and he don’t give a damn what other people think. He
can wear a cool troll mask, he can say “to hell with this” and take it off for
a few years, then he can say “ah what the hell, I miss the mask now” and put it
back on. He just does it. Whatever he wants to do, he does it. I want to be
like him. How do you make a living doing whatever the hell you want? Can
someone please tell me? Please? Why does Mortiis get to be a kickass rock star
and I have to work in fucking call centers? What did he do that I’m not doing?
I want to be like Mortiis! I want to roam the fjords of Norway and catch fish
with my bear hands and munch on them raw and wriggling! That’s what Mortiis
gets to do when he’s not doing concerts or is in the recording studio! Mortiis
lives his troll life and don’t give a damn! He climbs those cliffs with his
bare hands and feet to get a good view of the foggy waters in the fjord and
just screams at the moon “your absence makes me way too WICKED!” and “THE
DEMONS ARE BACK!” The wind blowing through his dreadlocks as he makes each
proud proclamation. How triumphant is the success of Mortiis the troll! Damn it Mortiis, I wish I were you. We all do,
man. I mean troll. We all do, troll.
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