Vim Fuego
The late Seth Putnam was a bit of an enigma. When he wasn’t being an offensive, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, anti-Semitic fuckwit, he could actually be a razor sharp parodist. Impaled Northern Moonforest, his “acoustic black metal” band, is a perfect example.
Like everything Putman touched, Impaled Northern Moonforest started as a joke, and right from the first seconds of the self-titled EP, the humour was pretty damned obvious. “Grim And Frostbitten Moongoats Of The North” opens with the a wind blowing through a forest, but the wind is Seth making whooshing noises. And then the guitars kick in. It’s fast and grim, and all acoustic. The percussion sounds a little thin and low in the mix (the word “mix” might be exaggerating the effort actually put into this), until you realise it’s not actually drums, but leg slapping. The vocals are grim, gargled, and impossible to understand.
And therein lies the beauty of this tremendous satire- it sounds like it could almost be genuine. Many black metal demos are badly recorded, often deliberately, and have all the fidelity of a knitting needle playing a tyre tread, as does this.
There is much to be parodied in black metal, and all the pretensions, posturing and puffery inherent in it are savagely poked with a stick and made fun of- the piss-poor production, the silly song titles (“Gazing At The Blasphemous Moon While Perched Atop A Very Very Very Very Very Very Very Forsaken Crest Of The Northern Mountain”, “Entranced By The Northern Impaled Necrowizard's Blasphemous Incantation Amidst The Agonizing Abomination Of The Lusting Necrocorpse”, “Grim And Frostbitten Gay Bar”) and the Satanic imagery.
And unlike many of Seth Putnam’s jokes, he knew when to wind this one up. This EP is over in less than eleven minutes, rather than making the mistake of trying to stretch a thin-ish joke to full album length as often happened with Anal Cunt. And you know what? As soon as it’s done, you’ll want to listen to it again, just to make sure you really did just hear what you thought you heard. And each time you listen, you’ll pick up another tiny part of the joke you missed the first time. That’s not to say there are hidden depths here, but “Impaled Northern Moonforest” cuts through the pomposity and bullshit, and holds up black metal to the full glare of daylight, much like the little boy seeing through the emperor’s new clothes in the fable.
Impaled Northern Moonforest had only a brief life span. There were originally only 200 copies of this pressed, which was thought to be about 196 too many at the time, but now original copies sell for hundreds of dollars. The band played only a handful of shows, often organized spontaneously, and recorded only one more song after this EP (“Return of the Necrowizard”). Serious black metal fans may find this offensive, or just plain silly, but casual fans, and anyone who has ever suppressed a grin at the excesses of the blackened genre should have a damn good laugh.