The All-Seeing Hand 'Mechatronics' Review

When I was a kid the city was an adventure.
You see, we lived (my family and I) in Golden Bay - a huddle of green-scrubbed hills and beaches of grainy golden (hence the name) sand, at the very top of the South Island of New Zealand. An earlier name for the place had been Murderer's Bay, which has a far less romantic vibe to it and was taken from the various pioneer-era skirmishes that had soaked those golden-sanded beaches in blood. It is a tiny place, largely rural, with a strong bohemian culture - those that wash up there are mostly artists, painters, ageing hippies and alternative life-stylers; people for whom the rest of the world is too loud, too grimy and too fast. It is a lovely place, caught in its own little pocket of time like an insect forever drowning in amber. It is a great place to grow up, I reckon. To have a childhood.

But the city...
By the city I mostly mean Christchurch, although even the odd day trip to Nelson was something to be looked forward to for weeks. The noise of it, the bustle of it; the shops, the people, the grey streets under grey skies. Weirdly the thing I remember most clearly is the motel rooms we would stay in - or the smell of those rooms; the cold smell of dead cigarettes, etched into every furnishing and piece of fabric, beneath the stronger odour of industrial-quantity cleaning products. And in each and all of those motel rooms my sister and I would tune the radio to whatever big-city station we could find. In Christchurch we mostly wanted RDU (the radio station run out of the University of Canterbury, where many years later I would go to study).

Picture us then, loading our cheap and cheerful bulk-bought cassettes into that radio and poised for something good to come over those airways - always cloaked in a hiss of faint white noise. We got us some stuff, man. A lot of what we heard was made right here in NZ. A lot of it was absolutely mental. The clank-and-squalor noise rock of Lung, 147 Swordfish, Canis, the seething chaos-melodic whorls of The Dead C, the guttural death-metal and grindcore bastardry of Human, the Antipodean black metal of Demoniac, the rioting, spazzed-out playfulness of The Conventional Toasters, and a myriad of names I can't even remember or perhaps never even knew.
Heck, back then even Head Like a Hole were at the lunatic fringe - controversial for their mud-caked nudity in the album booklet (and in live performances); and setting themes from Sesame Street to gurning funk-based metal (the track '13' off their debut).
Good times, man.

These were bands who got their stuff out quick and rough; cutting it fast-and-ugly in limited studio time. Releasing it with printed-at-home covers. Selling it at gigs. This stuff was never in print for very long. But hell, some of these bands are still working the scene, even today - ghosting around the fringes. That sound hit me in my formative years, man, and I still carry it inside me whenever I think of NZ music, whenever I try to define that thing that really needs no defining. Oh sure, I dug the fuzzed-out pop and krautrock rhythms of the Dunedin scene. But I was never huge on Bailter Space and those of their breed. Never much loved the other NZ stuff either - Straitjacket Fits and whatnot. I do dig me some early Headless Chickens though, but not 'Cruise Control' - could never stand that goddamn song.

By the way, I loathe pretty much anything with the name 'Finn' attached to it - bland music, like boiled milk. And Dobbyn sends me into an apoplexy of rage. All seem to me to be the musical equivalent of a medical waiting room; all tepid, trapped air, sterility and dull, dog-eared magazines that are ten years out of date.
Okay, I won't lie to you - that simile kind of got away from me.

Today the NZ music scene is dominated by internationally successful pop acts with alt. bite (Lorde, the Naked and Famous, Kimbra, Gin Wigmore, Ladyhawke, Ladi6) and don't get me wrong - I dig their music.
Heck, I love Wigmore's sophomore album 'Gravel & Wine' - I think that album is hugely underrated in this country - I love the swampy, bayou blues and brassy soul strut of it; and her crooning, taunting, versatile rasp of a voice is a stunning thing to my ears. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

But I dig me a bit of the underground scenesters to. And nowhere in this country seems to have a better handle on pulsing, experimental oddness than Wellington. Oh forget the diet-version of reggae-lite that seems to be sold here as 'roots' music.
Full disclosure; I don't particularly like reggae. So I have no tolerance for the diluted, lukewarm version of the same that is nigh-on inescapable here in Wellington. If that's your bag, though - well, more power to you. Oddly, I am rather a big fan of dub.

But for me, the true sound of Wellington is bands who are more like the red waiting room in David Lynch's 'Twin Peaks': the yellow-and-black zig-zagged floor, curtains of oozing red velvet and a sinister backwards-talking dwarf.
Okay. I'll stop. No more 'waiting room' parables

Wellington is for the weird.

To my ears, The All-Seeing Hand are one of the finest examples of a contemporary band driven by that same DIY, screw-genre-conventions impulse of those earlier NZ acts that I fondly recall - they are the proud bearers of that long-standing tradition of crazy-eyed, ambitious music produced by bands grown lean and hungry and clever... very damn clever.

Now, I'm not saying that their sound is 'the true NZ sound' as alleging such a thing of any band is a waste of time and typing. And how would that prove them a better band anyway?
What The All-Seeing Hand are is a brilliant band - courageous, transcendent, unique and very, very cool. And their second album 'Mechatronics' proves that point and scorches that statement into stone, man.

Previously on 'Dances for Architecture'...

The All-Seeing Hand are an outfit I simply had to investigate. With a line-up comprised of a drummer; a keyboardist/turntablist; and a vocalist trained in the technique of Mongolian throat-singing, you know they're going to be something special, profound and utterly different. Their style could perhaps be described as electro-doom metal/avant jazz...erm, experimental. It is intense, densely rhythmic and driving - a swirling mist of samples, electronic effects and seemingly-impossible vocalizations, propelled forward by percussion - both from the drums and the altered vocals themselves. It is also oddly, perversely catchy. And it is a challenge to the norm - a gauntlet thrown in the face of mediocrity and blandness.

Jonny Marks - throat; Alphabethead - turntables/keyboards/samples; B. Michael Knight - drums.
There are other instrumentalists and vocalists as well, guests players - a sliver here and there of guitar. The disc comes packaged in a handsome eco-pack; the disc sleeve itself lined in black cloth. A single vast eye stares out of a series of overlaid and incorporated images - images of conception, clockwork cogs and celestial bodies. Space, birth and the machine.

The sound is a riotous and shifting blend of glitched-out Aphex Twin spookiness, industrial rhythms, death metal malevolence, malfunctioning android bleeps, and math-rock dynamics. Sampled, sketched and scribbled across it all are the eerie whistling and basso undulations (very like the bone-deep cadence of a didgeridoo at points) of Mongolian throat singing. It is a sound that hits you in the meat and marrow of you - music you feel in your guts and viscera. But it is not all violence and tribal pounding - there are myriad moments of swirling and swooning calm amid the intensity (not least of all on closing track 'Cadentia').

At times Marks subjects his throat to the vocal acrobatics of 'NunSexMonkRock'-era Nina Hagen (his delivery eerily recalls Hagen's rasped and guttural contralto). Other times he screeches and hollers, chants and wails, occasionally dropping his voice into the bowel-scraping bellows of death metal.
As with all things of this nature, Mike Patton deserves a name check - this title would sit comfortably on his Ipecac roster.

For all its variation the sound on this album is tight, man - lean and consistent across the board - never uneven or cluttered; just as dense and complex as it needs to be. And the drumming, dude... Knight plays fast and precise - his drumming so accurate and focused as to sound almost inhuman - a clattering mechanical beat driving the music endlessly forward. But no machine or programmed track could keep up these shifting and intricate tempos. Alphabethead paints finger-smudges of instrumental texture across the beats. Chopping and splicing in snippets of found, sampled, tweaked and re-constructed sound: the sting of cellos; a slice of what sounds like the hum of an overloaded speaker; the crackle of worn vinyl; white-noise hiss; a slamming gate; and sci-fi audio effects. Elsewhere Alphabethead seems to be sampling Marks himself, stretching and elongated his throat-singing into the instrumental web of the track itself, making another instrument of it.

'Empty Road' rides a galloping doom-metal drum rhythm, the spaces between beats filled in with sustained keyboard drones - what, in fact, sounds like looped snatches of Marks' throat-singing - and string samples. Glitched-out electronic flickers pulse over the instrumental layers. Over it all Marks unleashes a series of chanted, hollered, and strangely uplifting wordless vocals. It sounds epic - a galloping track hurtling across scorched land and back to the wilderness.

'Maximum Capacity' boasts bright, cheap and cheerful electronic effects over a hammering industrial dance beat - sounding like nothing so much as a metal drummer jamming with one of those maddening Eighties arcade games. All this before the same track drops into a loose jazzy rhythm graced with weirdly percussive throat-whistles. It is a playful, oddly joyous track.

Spasmodic delirium, frequently bordering on absurdity: 'Lying Dead With a Bar of Soap' is the album's hookiest and most immediate track. It calls to mind early Head Like a Hole at their most wild-eyed and feral. Catchy, pummeling bass/drum riffery gives way to a wide-screen panorama of tribal percussion and atmospheric whistling before the riff comes clattering back complete with a delightfully deranged and very committed vocal performance (nigh-on audible lyrics!), basso chanting and enthusiastic whooping. It is immensely entertaining and utterly thrilling.

'Clot' incorporates slurred keyboard fills and intricate treble drum-work with bursts of grindcore pummeling and interludes of sweeping quietude and grandeur. The vocals switch between guttural babble, mountain-deep chanting and that seemingly-inhuman piping effect. For all its multitudinous parts the track remains cohesive, tightly-structured.

'The Claw' opens with the sound of crackling and popping vinyl before an intricate and mechanical drum pattern comes in - evoking some impossible and unthinkable factory assembly-line; weird oscillating swirls of distorted and backwards-effected samples fill in the negative space before the track abruptly switches into a pounding metal-worthy drumbeat over which Marks unleashes a blood-blackening banshee howl before adopting his Hagen-esque vocal (lyrics in German?).

'Geronimo II' features perhaps Marks' most gleefully unhinged vocal performance - a dual-pronged, multi-tracked marvel in which he shrieks like Mike Patton at his most lunatic over his own didgeridoo-pitched chants all underscored by deft, jazzy drum fills and melodic, B-Grade SciFi keys.

Fittingly, the brief track 'Grab and Smash' employs a drumbeat that pounds - three hard blows in quick succession: bam-bam-bam; the fist on your door at 3am, bringing only bad news. Over this intrusion Marks shouts, chants and shrieks while Alphabethead fills in the blanks with the distorted hum of crossed wires. Okay, this track with its Zorn-esque flourishes - yeah, this is definitely in PattonLand.

But for the most part the Patton comparison is reductive throughout 'Mechatronics' - there's no sense of imitation or emulation - The All-Seeing Hand are doing their own damn thing, man. It's just when you have a sufficient degree of skronking and vocal experimentation, well comparisons can be drawn and familiarity with that legend-of-the-field's work will serve as a fitting entry-point to the precise and intricately constructed madness here.

'Mechatronics' is an aural extravaganza; sideshow and carnival in one - melodic, hypnotic, rhythmic, deranged and yet so painstakingly constructed that it remains cohesive and intelligible throughout. It never clutters its own landscape with excessive embellishments or ornamentation  - it is experimental without ever becoming less-than accessible.

Also, that artwork has to look frigging amazing in the vinyl release of this title.
By the by, a friend assures me they are quite the experience live; so if you get the chance, take it. But wear earplugs, he cautions. They play really loud.

Go here for a taste...

Death Ray, CD Stores and Fragments of Me

If not for the loping graffiti-art snarling across the door frame and the small sign of printed-paper, lacquer and wood you'd probably miss it - the tiny record store half hidden down a Newtown side-street.

Death Ray Records.
Posters hang in the windows: psyched-out B-movie homage and gig posters, just starting to yellow at the edges. The store must have opened only recently. Their hours seem pretty casual. There is a lot of '-ish' printed on their handwritten sign. They were closed when I first arrived at the door - despite it being just after 2pm. The guy who mans the counter (and probably owns the joint) had presumably popped out for a bite to eat or to run some errand. They'd never need more than one staff member on...probably.

I stood over the road to get out of the screaming brilliance of the mid-afternoon sunshine - uncharacteristically bright for a day that was choked with mist at both dawn and dusk.
The wall opposite the shop was painted over and over with the message: 'Before I die I want to...' with spaces left for members of the public to fill in with their hopes, aspirations, and curios from their own personal bucket lists. But this is Newtown, most of the spaces were filled in with chalk-scrawled tags, obscenities and unintelligible scribbles that probably were never intended to be words. Oddly, no one had drawn a great big picture of a cock. Maybe that'll come later. There were a couple of folks taking it seriously - and a bit of anti-government ranting (to my relief).
I'm not sure what I want to do before I die. That's a whole other blog post waiting to happen.

Newtown.
If you've ever lived in Wellington, New Zealand you'll have heard of it. It's a large suburb lying not far from the heart of the city. The population is mostly made up of students (although fewer than in Te Aro as the rent is much more expensive), recent immigrants and the psychologically vulnerable (due to the proximity to Wellington hospital). It has probably the finest range of restaurants and eateries in any of Wellington's suburbs. It is sprawling, grimy and wonderful - clustered in along one side by thinly forested hills and adorned with rickety wooden houses; it is boisterous and exuberant and frequently a little awful. For a while you could buy a T-shirt bearing the message "Newtown, it's a bit shit".
There is a slight gang presence and a lot of visible mental illness.

In Newtown, I have been threatened and had obscenities snarled at me by a dude almost too drunk to stand on one occasion. He seemed to want my groceries. He had very ugly teeth. On another occasion a gentleman informed me that I had a very fine jacket and that I could either sell it to him or he and his friend would take it off me, presumably by force. The jacket in question used to belong to my father - it's an old corduroy number in a rusted, autumnal shade and I am very fond of it. I declined. He grinned and told me "fair enough". Then he assured me that it was a cool jacket and left me to it.

Newtown streets frequently smell of the raw saltiness of fish; the rich scents of cumin and coriander; and hash smoke. The odd empty shop window has been converted into a mini-gallery for artistic installations. I've worked in the area for a long time now. It's a great suburb.
But I live somewhere else.

Anyway, what the hell was I talking about?
Oh, yeah. A few minutes later the guy re-opened Death Ray and I poured in, ducking around the streamers of garbage bag that hang in the doorway. The store is one of those very NZ joints. Disheveled chic. Furniture sourced from junk sales, op-shops and hell, possibly even skips. Every piece mismatched and worn. A glass case along one wall looks to be filled with old slides or some such bric-a-brac. Every purchase must be written carefully in an exercise book - for record keeping. Posters crawl up the walls. The small room is crowded with wooden racks full of vinyl - divided into humorous genre classifications; some of the jackets scuffed and dog-eared, others brand-new and plastic-sealed. Canvases painted with bright scrawls of graffiti-art hang along one wall. Music plays loud, a rough beat.
It is a goddamn cool place; like the living room of every flat you secretly wished you lived in when you were a teenager. Or perhaps that's just me.

The scrambled student aesthetic makes me think of Java - a café that existed a frigging millennia ago in Christchurch - it was gone, I think, even before the earthquake turned the whole block into a churned heap of shattered masonry.
Man, I loved that place. Lots of memories, I guess. We used to hang there - my Christchurch friends and I - I'd buy whatever I could afford (which usually amounted to maybe one beverage). The whole place was decked out in unmatching and unmatchable furniture; a papier mache fish with a human face swung from one of the light fittings; a re-used and re-shaped bicycle had been turned into the staff-only gate. The drinks came in the kind of heavy, old glass jars that everybody's grandparents used for stewing fruit. Java also had the goddamn rickety-est stairs of any place I've ever encountered - every step would have them trembling and shuddering under your feet.
They basically pioneered the classic look that most folks associate with cafes in NZ today - though it has to be said, for most joints it's probably more a budgetary decision than an aesthetic one.

Anyway, standing in Death Ray surrounded by all that old vinyl and student loucheness, well, it brought it all back. That warm golden buzz of recollection - all those memories (good, bad, indifferent; it doesn't matter when it's all sepia-toned and autumn-hazed; bathed in the golden, magic light of a thirty-something guy's nostalgia). I dug through one of the vinyl racks, not sure why. It's a pointless act for me - I don't own a record player.

One of the categories was labeled 'Bogan Rock'. Nice.
In it I found a vinyl press of Ozzy Osbourne's 'The Ultimate Sin'. That was either the second or third album I ever bought (on cassette, no less). That cover, man - Ozzy's face on a looming demonic body rising from a pool of magma, wreathed in flames. A mushroom cloud scorches the sky. Before him stands a woman; her hair writhing blackly, her eyes red and huge. I bought my copy from a little shop in Golden Bay (where I lived at the time).
I think it was a video store - though they'd extended their ambitions to a small rack of audio stuff. Back then, if you wanted to sample something before you bought it you had to ask at the counter real nice. Maybe then they'd look into your child eyes and figure that you'd probably saved up a lot of lawn-mowing money to be able to afford this but you needed a taste first, so they'd slap it onto the cassette deck they had set up behind the counter and anyone who was in the store at the time would be treated to a few minutes of whatever the hell it was (and in my slightly later, harder metal years that might mean Sepultura's 'Arise' or Obituary - real ugly, death metal shit, man). I remember being phased at first by 'The Ultimate Sin' tape. Ozzy's voice sounded freaking odd - that strained, fractured tenor - but all the more compelling for its oddness. 'The Ultimate Sin' is primarily about the horror of nuclear war, I think. I should see if that bad boy is still in print.

Incidentally, the very first album I ever bought was Twisted Sister's 'Stay Hungry'; it was eight bucks from the World Record Music Club (or whatever it was called). With them, the deal was every couple of months they'd post out an updated catalogue. You'd go through and look at the artists and album titles, weigh up the prices. Then you'd carefully fill out the little order form in the back and beg, emotionally-blackmail or otherwise negotiate with your parents to write you a cheque. You'd post all that paperwork away and in about a month or so your cassette would arrive in a cardboard mailer sleeve. And this would make you very happy.
Kids, this is the way the world worked before there was the internet.

The possibly-second album I ever bought was Alice Cooper 'Raise Your Fist and Yell' - ten bucks from an appliance store in Motueka.
Man, I was such a junior bogan.

There's very few CD stores left in Wellington now. Actually there's none since the independently-run, niche-market stores emphasize the vinyl aspect of their trade (Rough Peel Music...and another one whose name I forget). There used to be plenty: Marbecks, The CD & DVD Store, ECM, Sounds, Real Groovy. Independent and chain alike. Now only Slow Boat remains - that long-hallowed bastion of independent music sales in Wellington, with it's faded cutouts and record sleeves in the window display. Its interior heavy with the smell of dust and rotting paper.

The market shifted, internet sales soared (and by 'internet sales' I guess I mostly mean downloads). Brick-and-mortar enterprises no longer held quite the same allure for the majority of the populace - the vinyl obsessives, of course, remained faithful. Then JB HiFi opened a branch here and devoured what remained of the market. Now you probably expect me to rend my clothes and smear my face with ashes - wailing and gnashing about the whole raw deal.
But...
But...
See, I effing love JB HiFI.
And, with that same passion inverted: I loathed all the stores it supplanted.
All of them.
They were over-priced: thirty-five bucks for a wide-release Australian-press CD - I don't frigging think so; we're not talking limited-release, special edition, bonus disc territory here. Their selections frankly sucked. And if you tried to import anything through them it would take weeks to arrive and then stood a good chance of setting you back fifty bucks or so.

Then there's the small matter of disc storage and security in NZ. Instead of installing a security sensor on the door and tagging all the CDs in stock, the majority of these stores would remove the discs from their cases (y'know, the ones whose sole purpose is to protect the disc in the first place), slip said disc into a paper wallet and file it away with all the others in a big metal filing cabinet behind the counter. This meant your brand-new CD would most likely be badly scratched, fingerprinted, grimy and covered in surface dust before you bought it. There was also the possibility that the person at the counter might be unable to locate the disc as someone else had filed it incorrectly. And that was just how things were. The longer the store had the disc in stock, the worse its condition would be. Some wound up just goddamn filthy.
If you've read my 'Anxiety Always' post, you'll know this is kind of a deal-breaker for me.

There was also something relentlessly depressing about those stores: the digipaks would be battered and worn, the jewel cases so scratched that the plastic appeared milky; opaque as a cataract-blinded eye. Witnessing the slow death of Real Groovy was unpleasant and perhaps inevitable: its shelves hollowing out, sale after sale announced (and they were still mostly overpriced).

And then JB HiFi came along, with its wonderfully soulless efficiency, its security guards and sensors, its plastic-sealed everything. Mint condition CDs: a vaster selection than any other store had ever offered and at a significantly lower cost per item. Oh sure, there's no sense of community; no random aficionado at the counter to recommend some new indie band that they really think you might dig. Everything is polite, perfect and slightly impersonal - bathed in fluorescent light.
Everything is exactly how I like it.

But, I'm still thrilled to find Death Ray Records - a little store that mostly sells something I'm not going to buy (second-hand records; useless to me on two levels).There is one other thing though...

Death Ray Records stock a small assortment of brand-new CDs. Independent NZ releases - the kind of stuff that JB HiFi doesn't carry. Death Ray also leave the CDs in their original packaging where they belong. And they charge $20-$25 per title. They had a title I was particularly keen on finding:
'Mechatronics', the latest release from Wellington-based experimental trio The All-Seeing Hand.

The All-Seeing Hand are an outfit I simply had to investigate. With a line-up comprised of a drummer; a keyboardist/turntablist; and a vocalist trained in the technique of Mongolian throat-singing, you know they're going to be something special, profound and utterly different. Their style could perhaps be described as electro-doom metal/avant jazz...erm, experimental. It is intense, densely rhythmic and driving - a swirling mist of samples, electronic effects and seemingly-impossible vocalizations, propelled forward by percussion - both from the drums and the altered vocals themselves. It is also oddly, perversely catchy. And it is a challenge to the norm - a gauntlet thrown in the face of mediocrity and blandness.

But this isn't going to be a review (that is something I'll have to come back to later); although if you're keen: Simon Sweetman's review on his Off the Tracks blog is worth reading (I've no love for Sweetman - see my post on Lorde's album 'Pure Heroine' - but in his review of 'Mechatronics' he speaks the truth, and speaks it well). Needless to say, The All-Seeing Hand are another worthy entry into the pantheon of surprisingly challenging, engaging and compelling bands based in Wellington, alongside such names as Beastwars, Porcelaintoy, the Nudge and Orchestra of Spheres. Also, the artwork on 'Mechatronics' is superb; it really captures the mesmeric and synapse-scorching landscape within which the trio operate.

So thank you Death Ray Records, mostly just for existing at all.

The Ritual.

'The Ritual' is a novel by English author Adam Nevill, first published in 2011 - in the UK.
It was featured in a recent list of the fifty most terrifying novels ever written.
Challenge accepted.

(A brief note: this post contains spoilers, but I'll try to limit it to stuff that will not detract from the experience of the novel).

Four friends. Hutch, Phil, Luke & Dom. Many years ago they shared a flat. Those days are now immortalized in gauzy, golden hues in their memories. But they were a very long time ago. They haven't seen each other for years. They have grown distant, the gulf between them widening.
They meet up again for a hike through the lavish Scandinavian wilderness. It is to be a reunion of sorts, a way of putting the outside world at bay for a while and losing themselves once again in that haze of friendship.

But early on it becomes clear that Phil and Dom are not up to the task. They have grown fat and sluggish and are ill-prepared for the raw land beneath their feet. After a brief negotiation with Luke, Hutch decides that they should take a detour - a shortcut - that will slice a couple of days off the trek and might save their friends some additional pain and exhaustion. This detour will take them from the clear-cut tourist tracks and through the sparsest edge of a spread of largely-virgin forest.
Bad idea.

Into the scowling umbra of the woods they go. But the tracks they sought to follow among those trees are barely-there, worn away and swallowed by the bracken perhaps centuries ago.  They rapidly become lost - clutched in the lightless grip of the bush. Close to nightfall they come upon a house; beaten-down and scarred by the elements. It appears boarded up and abandoned. Eager for shelter, with what little strangled daylight had previously found its way among the foliage fading now, they break into the house.
Bad, bad idea.

Inside they find dust-grimed floors, the skitter-scrape of mice, walls hung with crudely fashioned crosses (some inverted), and a myriad of bleached and blackened animal skulls hung on nails. Upstairs they find something a great deal worse. They find proof that there was madness in these woods: madness, ritual and terrible deeds done in darkness and worship. Their sleep that night is haunted by vivid (and horribly similar) dreams, by sleep-walking and hysteria. By dawn they are exhausted, their skin blanched and their eyes shattered. They push on: desperate to be rid of the house, the forest, each other.

But in the deepest of the shadows something watches them - something that barks and gibbers and yelps. It is creature older than human civilization; a towering, stilt-legged, goat-snouted shape crowned in horns. It is sinuous and quick, hungry and eternal. And it is eager for fresh sacrifice.
In the woods and in the darkness, these four men will be hunted. Their suffering will be long and cruel and death when it comes will be slower still.

But this is not just a story of monsters, madness and survival. It is also a tale of thirty-something ennui. Of lives that have worn too thin and friendships that have become threadbare with time. It is the story of four old friends trying, and failing, to reconnect with each other.

Luke rapidly emerges as our protagonist. At first he is a difficult character to love. He is single and only sporadically-employed. Trivialized, marginalized and beaten down by the world. He nurses a constant, simmering rage that has recently begun to erupt into outright violence. He is a man disappointed; by himself, by the world, and by the friends with whom he has so very little left in common. Oddly, as the narrative progresses - we (the readers, obviously) come closer to him, drawn in by his brokenness and frustration. He is damaged and vulnerable, his existence fleeting and fragile. He is uncomfortably and utterly human, deeply flawed and self-loathing. This makes him seem more real to us, more convincing.

I won't lie to you, I felt immediately drawn to this character; although I know nothing of Luke's anger and little enough of his loneliness. As a single guy in my thirties myself this does seem very age-appropriate reading for me and the author's portrayal of that melancholy strikes a resonant chord. In a world where everyone becomes their own personal PR campaign - marketing the absolute-best / fantasy version of themselves via social media and networking platforms...well, the hardest thing to admit can be that everything is not going according to the plan. And this is the reality that Luke struggles with - the gulf between the truth of us and the mythology we have created.
But, anyway...

Luke is not alone in carrying a sack of woe upon his back. Of the four, only Hutch seems truly happy - he is recently married and still in excellent physical shape. Dom and Phil carry their own frustrations and disappointments; though both have families (and in Phil's case, considerable wealth). As the narrative progresses it becomes apparent that these seeming triumphs are illusory things too, and that both men have something they're keeping from their friends and perhaps even from themselves.

From the creeping dread of the earlier scenes - the discovery of the house in the woods, the stalking menace of the half-glimpsed something - the novel soon falls into the beats of the survival horror genre. Little-by-little the men are robbed of their humanity and driven against one another. The relentless grind of dripping trees and congealing darkness becomes exhausting to read - as the characters succumb to hunger and desperation, reduced to little more than shivering, starving animals crawling through mud and dead leaves, too weary even to speak.
In this, 'The Ritual' recalls 'The Ruins' by American author Scott Smith (brilliant and relentless novel; terrible goddamn movie). Although Nevill's novel is grander and laced with rich, occult mythology.

Then just as it seems that this narrative has been driven to its absolute limit (and with a solid chunk of novel yet to unfold) it abruptly changes course. It becomes what I can only describe as 'The Wicker Man' meets 'Antichrist' (yes, the infamous - and astonishing - film by Danish madman Lars von Trier) by way of the Norwegian black metal scene.
Nope, I'm not kidding about the black metal thing.

Again, Nevill proves himself very savvy in his choices (and meticulous in his research). The whole idea of metal musicians as genuinely evil lunatics who want to commit terrible atrocities against their fellow humankind is a z-movie concept - lazy and hackneyed. It just doesn't wash - for all that they were labeled a 'satanic band' Black Sabbath's main lyricist - Geezer Butler - is a lifelong Catholic (very explicit in the lyrics to 'After Forever'), Alice Cooper is devoutly Christian, Cradle of Filth are really just a bunch of clever, theatrical dudes who have watched way too many horror flicks. Of all the occult-metallers only King Diamond actually walked the talk - for a time he was a follower of Anton LaVey (author of the Satanic bible) - although Diamond treated this as more of a philosophy than a religion and in his later years has renounced religion in any form and declared himself an atheist.

But...

The Norwegian Black Metal scene is a different breed of beast, and one possessed of a history that is profoundly disturbing. Think of Varg Vikernes (aka Count Grishnackh) - the scowling vocalist/founder of black metal outfit Burzum. He is name-checked in 'The Ritual'. Vikernes is a white supremacist, a convicted murderer and now a suspected terrorist (also a JRR Tolkein fan presumably, given the name Burzum).
In 1993 he was jailed for the murder of Mayhem guitarist Oystein 'Euronymous' Aarseth. His music and work is considered a founding influence on the appalling genre that has come to be referred to as National Socialist Black Metal, though the Wikipedia entry on Vikernes reports that he never used Burzum to promote his own prejudiced beliefs.
Either way I can never listen to his music for the same reason that I can no longer watch a Roman Polanski film or listen to a Chris Brown song - okay, with Brown there's a whole bunch of other reasons for this avoidance.

There was a spate of church burnings across Norway; committed largely by fans of this music and inspired by the same philosophies that Nevill has a character articulate in the novel. Christianity came late to Norway and it came brutally, in a wash of blood and persecution; supplanting the pagan and pre-Christian worship of the people of that country. There is a long history of rage there.

All of which provides a context and makes it apparent why Nevill elected to set 'The Ritual' in Scandinavia - Sweden, to be precise. The Norwegian black metal kids in this novel are pathetic and contemptible - clowns in corpsepaint rather than greasepaint. They're idiots; arrogant, privileged and obsessed with the mythology of themselves...but that is a large part of what makes them so believable and genuinely frightening. In typing this I recall that the novel also reminded me, in part, of the superb and harrowing horror film 'Eden Lake' (a film that still stands as one of the most frightening things I've ever watched).

But there are supernatural monsters in 'The Ritual' too; from the beast-God in the woods, to the twitching and mummified dead in their shrine.
And there are rituals to be practiced and sacrifices to be made.
It is a world where mercy is a luxury and survival means sacrificing your humanity.

'The Ritual' is a cruel novel; an almost relentlessly grim tale. When it opens things are bad enough already and they only get worse as the narrative progresses. Shards of humour glint here and there but it is a cruel kind of mirth and offers little respite from the bleakness. The handful of almost-tender and forgiving moments are all-too-quickly consumed. Adam Nevill's literary voice is hugely compelling. His use of language is rich and evocative - appealing to all five senses (something of a rarity as I've always felt many writers neglect describing scents and odours). It is bleak and beautiful and the pace is relentless: the novel opens with the discovery of a gutted animal hung in the trees, thirty pages in and the four guys are at the house. You feel every wound the protagonists sustain and you understand their rage and despair. It is grand, contemporary myth-making.

I also appreciated the way Nevill captures the banal, brutal farce of violence; rifle butts jam against door frames, characters stumble and lurch clumsily from one punch to the next, one character tries - and fails - to fire a gun multiple times before realizing the safety is on. The reader never once feels that these are anything less (or more) than real people - undone by exhaustion and the horrible reality of what they're doing. It never feels staged or Hollywood-esque. I admired that.

I also note that Nevill lived for a time in New Zealand. I like to believe that this serves as an influence on the novel (for all that it is set in Sweden, and needs to be - for the mythology of the novel requires a long history; far longer than NZ has). The bush in this country is a dangerous thing - every few years a tramper underestimates it and strays from the beaten-down hiking paths. But the trees grow dense and dark and there is a predatory aspect. People disappear. Sometimes their bones are found later, blanched and brown shards among the leaf-rot. Sometimes they are never found at all. The term 'virgin' forest suggests a kind of innocence, a purity (Nevill has a character echo these sentiments in his novel) but that is a false impression. The bush eats the unwary.

But it is not a perfect novel. There is a rotten whiff of misogyny carried in the subtext. I'm not sure whether this reflects the author's personal prejudices or whether it is meant to be indicative of our flawed protagonist Luke (from whose perspective the tale is told). I'll assume the latter, but it still makes me uncomfortable - and not in the way one wants from a horror novel.

Nonetheless, this is a small misgiving. And 'The Ritual' by Adam Nevill is a complex and challenging work; one of those glorious novels that smuggles a literary aspect into a genre format. Nevill is a writer that I look forward to investigating further.