Gallhammer, Ill Innocence

Gallhammer is an all-girl black metal band from Tokyo patterned after Hellhammer and its psuedo-successor Celtic Frost. If that sentence alone does not make you at least check out their Myspace, then you have no backbone whatsoever. Ill Innocence is the girls’ second full-length album, and lives up nicely to the legacy of their previous effort, Gloomy Lights.

Let’s talk vocals, shall we? This album is written in a completely made-up dialect (which I call “Gallhammerian”) that sounds like Japanese, English, and Klingon all at the same time. For those of you interested, the English translation is available for perusal with the CD. Composer, bassist, and lead vocalist Vivian Slaughter has the voice of a murdered nun, and that analogy fits quite well with the horrible things the CD insert tells me she’s singing about. In fact, the whole musical approach is as distorted as a swarm of locusts, a Biblical plague in audio form carefully measured like an army march.

The album opens with “At the Onset of the Age of Despair,” which lives up to its title. Serving as a wonderfully horrible prelude, it’s a good choice of background music for suicide bombers and snuff-film makers. Still, it comes across as strangely melodic and indirectly complex and feels like an eight-minute version of World War II. The pace of the album picks up nicely with “Speed of Blood,” and particularly with “Blind my Eyes,” which features some absolutely awesome J-Pop backing vocals from drummer Risa Ripper. If gangrape had cheerleaders, “Blind my Eyes” would be the song they would set their state competition dance routine to.

Never at a loss for a change-up, “Delirium Daydream” is 1/3 pop ballad, 1/3 sludge metal, and 1/3 The Idiot by Iggy Pop. Gallhammer refuses to coast through the middle of the album and instead uses it to show the audience the band’s more experimental side. And just when you thought it was safe, here comes the murder ballad “Ripper in the Gloom.” Vivian, Risa, and guitarist Mika Penetrator hit a perfect dissonant rhythm in a bit of Jandek-style darkness for two-minutes before tossing it all aside in a sudden, frenzied speed metal race back to the status quo with “Killed by the Queen.” Brief aside: the line “I was killed by a queen of killing” rivals Consortium of Genius’s “Death to the Angel of Death” as the most metal line ever. End aside.

Ill Innocence is not crossover material. This is metal and nothing but, and occasionally that works against Gallhammer. “Song of Fall” is, as Pinhead put it, so exquisitely empty, and Vivian’s bass sounds like a church bell at night until the zombies start clawing out of their graves. This is one of the few times when the sludge metal vocals work against them, however, as the two-line poem that makes up the lyrics is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read:

Fall in fall and dream in dream
I am in fear and eternal fall

It’s funny how much an awkward translation can say, and it’s a shame that Vivian tread her usual — though awesome — path and distorted a moment of pure poetry. Ironically, a softer vocal is used on the next track, “World to be Ashes,” in between the hell screams.

The album ends on a more transcendental note, with the eight-and-a-half minute “SLOG” and the instrumental “Long Scary Dream.” Both, though still unequivocally in the same dark and hopeless vein, do seem to promise some life among the ashes. “Long Scary Dream,” in particular, is dominated by a long frightened moan in the mix, and the listener is ultimately drawn to the conclusion of a nightmare ended. Scarred by our inner demons, we are nonetheless alive.