Make A Change Kill Yourself

The Danish musician disguised under the moniker Make A Change Kill Yourself was yet another purveyor of Katatonia-style suicidal black metal at the peak of the genre. He unfurled the four colossal agonies of Make A Change Kill Yourself (Total Holocaust, 2005) and established himself as a leader of the genre's radical fringe. The function of the relatively dull Chapter I seems to be simply to establish the mood of tension. Chapter II is equally faceless except after minute 10 when it turns into a lugubrious baroque adagio which then morphs into a celestial hymn. That's the prelude to the zenith of pathos reached in Chapter III, that boasts an anthemic march-like guitar progression picked up at the end by a Morricone-ian female vocalist. Chapter IV (a 27-minute juggernaut) opens with a terrifying scream and continues with a deluge of blast beats and guitar drones, but the vocals are actually articulating a tender melody. A woman with a fairy-queen voice makes an announcement and gets lulled away by the repetitive pattern of the guitar. The vocals return for a more demonic declamation. Everything implodes at minute 19, followed by eight minutes of serene chamber music. This is music that relies a lot on repetition, and therefore its quality depends on what is being repeated on and on. The guitar's tremolo can replicate the exact same pattern for an eternity.

The two suites of II (Total Holocaust, 2007) upped the ante. The 24-minute Life Revisited opens with a misleading piano theme but then delves into a suicidal chant that makes the first album sound like fun. The drumbeat is hysterical most of the way. When it stops for a few seconds, we hear the only true music of the piece, acoustic and romantic. The depression is even more severe in the 18-minute Fooling the Weak, evoking the vision of a demon screaming during a funeral march, each pause being a stage in the calvary of the rotting soul. Few albums have been able to turn existential angst into sound like the first two albums by this Danish maniac.

Keyboards and vocals remain the weakest point of Fri (2012), that otherwise simply follows up in the footsteps of its predecessors.