Vorago — Morulus (Amor Fati)

Given all the socio-political complexity (less generously: cynical, hateful bullshit) associated with black metal, one may have some trepidation about a release that includes a song called “Torquemada” and numerous allusions to Nietzsche: see the song title “As It Gazes Back” and the band’s name, which translates variously to “abyss, and a voracious capacity to swallow.” The perverse appropriation of Nietzsche by right-wing politics is as persistent as it is moronic. One hopes the folks involved in Vorago, a black metal band featuring players from Germany and Mexico, are more circumspect in how they view that abyss, and its capacity to stare in return.

Those concerns noted, Morulus is exactly the sort of black metal record this reviewer hopes to hear. Scabrous and full of negation, heavy and lancing in equal measure, breathtakingly fast but precisely landing sharp blows somewhere in the listener’s lower abdomen — Vorago have produced a sort of sonic ideal. Of course, ideal is likely the wrong word to use. Songs like “Negative Response” and “Blutkelch” seem engineered with the express purpose of rubbing our snouts in something dirty, malodorous and alarmingly stringent. They do so, with a deeply visceral impact.

Still, to drop a name like Torquemada, either casually or with great drama, and to provide no additional context takes chances, and asks the listener to take chances. To state what one hopes is still an obviousness: Tomás de Torquemada’s issuance of the Alhambra Decree and advocacy for use of torture in the Inquisition’s brutal oppression of Jews are historical atrocities. Playing peek-a-boo with black metal’s national socialist contingent through calculated name-dropping of that sort would be objectionable; slavering worship of Torquemada would more emphatically be a loser position.

It would be nice to be able to listen to black metal without these kinds of qualifications, disclaimers and paranoias. Sadly that’s not the culture we inhabit. Nietzsche may have attempted to project philosophical discourse into a discursive space beyond good and evil, but one doubts the vapid valorization of nihilisms one encounters in the subgenre and among some elements of its listenership is what he had in mind. The sort of aggressively negative noise of Morulus? That might be closer, or at least near to beyond.

Jonathan Shaw