Band:	Brocken Moon
Album:	Das Märchen Vom Schnee
Style:	Depressive black metal
Release date:	February 04, 2008
Guest review by:	brimarsh

01. I
02. II
03. III
04. IV
05. V
06. VI

It doesn't necessarily take a historian to describe the boom of black metal witnessed at the turn of the century. "True" black metal was in its pre-teens; new ideas were still warm and malleable, and everyone wanted a hand in their creations. Coupled with the rapid advancement of technology for both consumer and creator, music?as a whole?was arguably at its most accessible. Metal spread like wildfire within online communities, and would-be black metallers donning cliched pseudonyms lifted from Tolkein tales or the thesaurus entries under "evil" would give way to quite an extensive catalogue of metal-by-number discographies that possessed little intrigue and even less retainability.

Since 1999, Brocken Moon has accrued an array of quasi-inspired and inconsistent demos?most of which have been re-pooled and re-released as wholly unnecessary compilations?as well as two full-length albums of unique material (insofar as previously unreleased as a demo). Whilst their demos, compilations, and most recent work (the now nine-year-old Hoffnungslos) are predominantly forgettable, Das Märchen Vom Schnee is nestled between the nonsense, providing arguably the only worthwhile listening experience in a discography that spans over a decade. While so many failed projects died clinging to the coattails of their forefathers, Brocken Moon somehow skirted this fate on Das Märchen Vom Schnee by clinging to the coattails of not just one, but? well, most of them really.

If I had to attribute Brocken Moon's career-wide failures to one characteristic, it'd be their inconsistency rather than their genericity. Songwriting duties early on were all over the place, which would ultimately lead to demos sounding disjointed and convoluted. Occasionally, good ideas would stumble their way in, yet discordance in regards to brevity and its application would either run the aforementioned appeal into the ground, or it would not be afforded the necessary measures to evolve and come to fruition, resulting in haphazard structuring and flow. With their reputation of holding too tightly onto genre tropes, often stretching them thin and wearing out their welcome, I find it peculiar that Das Märchen Vom Schnee, for all of its many levels of genericity, would be such a satisfying endeavor.

Perhaps its most notable feature, comparatively, is its coherence. Aside from it being the outfit's first full-length release not consisting of previously written or recorded material, it's also the first with uniformity in its writing and recording. Being a self-proclaimed "fairytale", tracks are presented to us without titles; each piece is a part of a larger story rather than a standalone track, which provides a more structured and cohesive flow from start to finish. Humanhater?despite being more infamously known for his juvenile pseudonym and numbskullery in defacing Jewish graves?does a rather commendable job in providing a dynamic backbone through his production and mixing values. The overall sound is a bit par for the course, albeit feeling a bit disingenuous in its bleakness at times; however, instruments are mixed aptly and wholly audible across the spectrum, rarely feeling drowned or lost even as their roles shift through the compositions.

"Genericity" is a word that has been used here more than once, and unavoidably so. The fact is nigh-impossible to ignore. Nevertheless, what Brocken Moon gives to us here is a grab bag of generic ideas presented with a touch of eccentricism in their arrangements that dissipates much of the tedium that plagued their back catalogue. From the orthodoxical and melodic riff stylings of mid-90s Norwegian black metal to glistening, nature-driven neo-folk passages; from pensive, sprawling soundscapes of Slavic atmospheric black metal to the depressive howlings and trance-like lingering guitar passages akin to the DSBM scene? Das Märchen Vom Schnee is a whirlwind of influence, dancing from sound-to-sound, often multiple times in a given track without feeling disjointed or overtly forced or formulaic. Individual passages suffer a bit from predictability, though slight refuge can be found through subtle tempo changes and off-kilter drum beats that alter the pacing when stylistic variances would otherwise feel unwarranted; notwithstanding, there's very little done to save its monotonous monolith of an insipid closer that rattles off the same shimmering arpeggiated chord for twenty minutes, offering little of interest outside of maybe three total minutes where there's a sparse accompaniment of ambient synth. Remember that brevity issue? I hate to resort to adage, but I guess old habits truly do die hard.

From an objective standpoint, I find little actually wrong with Das Märchen Vom Schnee outside of its absolutely asinine outro. The production, though a bit disingenuous at times, is well-suited to carry the compositions it seeks to accentuate. The instrumentations are modest and coalesce into very functional pieces that offer a modicum of memorability through subtle rhythmic variances and pantheons of stylistic influence. Its biggest downfall is being nearly a decade too late for any of its components to feel fresh, though I suppose that having just enough eccentricity to differentiate it from the fathoms of facsimiles that spawned alongside it is admirable enough in its own sense and, at the very least, keeps it from the trash bin of black metal history.