Bandcamp The sleeve is a photograph of a concrete road bridge over grey water, shot from below in black and white. No forest, no fog, no figure in the snow. For a Swedish band who tag themselves depressive black metal that is close to a provocation, and it is the first sign that Moralisk Inflation is not the record the genre label predicts.
The second sign is the tracklist. “Rösta På Vaddå?” is “Vote For What?”. “Vakna Och Känn Stanken Av Moralisk Cancer” is an instruction to wake up and smell the stench of moral cancer. “Valvakans Rekviem” is a requiem for election night. Whatever this band’s private misery is, the album is not about it. Moral inflation is a word for a society that spends its ethics faster than it earns them, and Vanskapt and Brutus have written sixty six minutes about watching that happen.
The suite that holds it together
Four of the eleven tracks are called “Moralisk Inflation”, numbered one to four. Two of them open the record and two close it, and they are not interludes: each runs between four and a half and six minutes, and together they take twenty two of the album’s sixty six. That is a third of the running time spent on the title, wrapped around the seven songs that make the argument.
It works as architecture. The suite is the frame, the named songs are the evidence, and the record ends where it began rather than resolving anything. On an album about a process that does not stop, that is the right ending to choose.
What is actually inside the wall
Mostly one thing, and that is the problem. Nine of the eleven tracks hold a very narrow distance between their loudest and quietest moments, and they hold a near identical tonal picture with more than half the energy in the guitars’ range and the bass buried underneath them as foundation. Once you are inside, you stay inside. “Jag Borde Inte Få Finnas” is the extreme case, the flattest and the most mid-concentrated thing here, and at nearly six minutes it asks for more patience than it repays.
Three tracks break out, and they are the best three. “Moralisk Inflation I” opens the album with the widest swing on it. “Rösta På Vaddå?” is the sharpest and most articulate song here, the one where the riffs stay readable instead of merging. And “Upplyft” does something the rest of the record does not: it comes in on a dry, close acoustic guitar before the wall arrives, and it is measurably the loudest and warmest thing on the album, with far more weight in the low midrange than anything around it. The one track that lifts is called “uplift”. That is either a very good joke or a very good instinct.
For the record, this is not the flattened modern master the genre often gets. The album sits several decibels below the level most of its peers chase, and the peaks keep real distance from the average throughout. There is room here. The band simply do not use much of it.
A note on where this lands
Depressive black metal carries a set of associations that deserve care, and it is worth being clear that this album is not doing the thing the tag usually implies. The despair here is civic. The record is angry at a public, not inviting anyone to follow it anywhere, and the one song that reads as self-directed, “Jag Borde Inte Få Finnas”, is also the one buried deepest in the middle rather than given a spotlight. That ordering is a choice and I think it is a deliberate one.
So
Recommended with a real caveat about length. There is a very good forty minute album inside this sixty six minute one, and it is made of the title suite, “Rösta På Vaddå?”, “Upplyft” and “Vakna Och Känn Stanken Av Moralisk Cancer”. The rest holds the same shape for too long, and the middle of the running order is where most listeners will step off. Come for the idea, which is sharper than almost anything else in this corner of the genre right now, and be ready to skip.
This is a quiet record by the standards of its genre. Nine of the eleven tracks sit between fourteen and seventeen decibels below full scale in average level, with peaks holding a wide distance above that, so there is far more headroom here than the style usually allows itself. What the album does not do is use it. Nine tracks stay inside roughly two to five decibels between their softest and loudest passages and hold a near identical tonal balance, better than half the energy between 800 hertz and 5 kilohertz and the bottom end running as foundation rather than as a separate voice. “Jag Borde Inte Få Finnas” is the narrowest of all and also the most concentrated in the midrange. The exceptions are three: the opening part of the title suite, which runs nearly seventeen decibels between quiet and loud, “Rösta På Vaddå?”, which is the brightest and second widest, and “Upplyft”, which sits some five decibels louder than everything else, carries the most weight in the low midrange by a clear margin and has the lowest tonal centre on the album.
Standout tracks: Rösta På Vaddå?, Upplyft, Moralisk Inflation I
