I was keeping my fingers crossed that Neonism was going to follow the reissue of Solefald debut album The Linear Scaffold, as in my opinion the 1999 album was their best to date and is a firm favourite of its time, an album standing out in a field of its own and one that has honestly never been imitated. It’s the out on a limb avant-gardism of the album that really makes it quite so unique. Sure Fleurety might have just about pipped Solefald at the post for mangling black metal into completely insane territories but this one did not come very far behind. It is the lyrics that particularly grab your attention as the songs fly out with a clash of political and cultural references, namedropping the movers and shakers of the time with a jaded cynicism. Everyone from Naomi Campbell to Calvin Klein gets a mention and the perfumed poeticism behind songs such as ‘CKII Chanel No.6’ really does have to be heard to be believed. But be warned you will find yourself singing along to the lyrics, “Coco Chanel, welcome to hell. Let me out of my prison cell,” after that first confused listen. The album is perhaps the sound of a Warhol painting, its barking mad, pop culture gone wrong!
‘Proprietors Of Red’ sees warped harmonics strangely grating away behind Lazare’s clean vocals and then it gallops off and Cornelius joins in with rasping blackened growls. The music never stands still for a second and hones at you with unhinged and frantic schizophrenia. You could not particularly classify this at all, keyboards are equally mutant, bringing in a psychedelic, proggy flavour to things and as much as anything within metal circles I would describe this as sounding like a mix of Frank Zappa, The Cardiacs and Julian Cope! It is interesting to note that on its original release the album had evolved so far from the typical scope of traditional black metal that the band received death threats!
That is not to say that it completely ignores black metals structures. Listen to the rabid scream at the start of ‘Speed Increases To The Scaffold’ and the nutty pace, which does not hang around in the slightest. When the song calms though, to allow the clean singing and the harmonic chorus to soar you realise you are certainly straddling two different musical hemispheres. There is even what sounds like a bit of drum and bass rhythm rearing its head in this number before it is done. The whole album is like dropping particularly potent acid, it does not take you on a bad trip but it takes you on a completely strange one, running around in your head and unlocking parts of your brain completely randomly. There are so many parts of this that I really like that even though you feel as a whole this should not gel together and even work, it does and cohesively makes some sort of sense, but perhaps this is as much down to past use of hallucinogens as anything else.
I’m going to duck out of any further dissections of the actual music contained on this disc, it’s actually very difficult to describe anyway due to the complicity of the material. All I will say if you have not previously checked Neonism out its worth doing so, as it will probably be quite unlike anything you have ever heard before. I would go as far as to say this is an underrated classic of its time. My one complaint of the reissue is that it seems to have a different somewhat boring cover art compared to the distorted tripped out colours of the original but that’s a small complaint considering the deranged genius within.
http://www.myspace.com/solefaldofficial
