TRIST — Hin-fort (review)

Album · 2007 · Atmospheric Black Metal

3/5 · 2012-02-28
Wilytank

Germany's Trist seemed like a good pie to dip my finger in after dipping my other fingers into the pies belonging to the Czech Trist and Lunar Aurora, the Czech Trist for the shared names and Lunar Aurora because Aran from Lunar Aurora is also the sole musician in Germany's Trist. I guess it's also good to have had an entire hand dipped in Darkspace's pie as well since I've seen people compare the German Trist (hereon referred to simply as Trist, I have no need to bring up the Czech one again for the rest of this review) to Darkspace. A comparison between one of my favorite bands and one totally new to me raises one important question: why the hell haven't I reviewed 'Dark Space II' yet? Alright another one: can Trist live up to the comparisons to one of my favorite bands? Eager to satisfy my curiosity, I tracked down 'Hin-Fort' (due to my inability to find Trist's debut, 'Tiefenrausch (Ein Abstieg in fünf Stufen)') and let the judgement begin.

The first disc here contains an hour long song. Hmm...Darkspace haven't even attempted to make a song of that length. Pressing play, I am greeted with some spacey ambient, so we have a mood setter. This already sounds different than Darkspace though. Darkspace's music is always at a lower key that gives it a freakier, scarier, more destructive sound. Trist sounds less so. Aran seems more interested in the light, transcendental aspects of space. I can hear the soft roar of raw black metal tremolo guitar in the background, so I guess this could be classified as black ambient. Let's see how this unfolds.

Ten minutes later: Still the same ambient? Wow, not even Darkspace carries out ambient mood setters that long. Paysage d'Hiver does in some songs, most notably on the first part of 'Nacht', but even that is its own separate song on some versions of the album. Here on "Hin", the prolonged mood setter is part of the whole song. I wouldn't mind it so much if it actually varied, but...

Roughly five minutes later: Hey, a sample! At least we have some sort of variation. Let's see what this guy has to say. Hmm...light, darkness, the cosmos. Weird, mystical philosophy and science talk? Not uncommon with the space theme, but still lighter than Darkspace's sampling from 2001: A Space Odyssey or Event Horizon. The good news is that once he shuts up, the actual black metal kicks in. And so begins the raw, layered tremoloing and continuous blast-beat of the programmed drums. Eventually, Aran does some vocals, but they sound like some beast yawning. Following that yawning (and all other sessions of yawning in the song), some spacey keyboards are played. So, as far as the tremolos and blast-beating drums go, I guess this is like Darkspace, but the higher key still makes Trist distinctly not Darkspace.

Fifteen minutes later: You know what else makes Trist not Darkspace? It's that Darkspace have a good amount of variations in their songs, both in riffing and in tempo. Trist's "Hin" has neither of those going for it. the aforementioned yawning and keyboard mix is broken up by some guitar work, but then it's pretty much copy/paste throughout the entire piece. Eventually, the guy from the first sample comes back and says some more stuff, but then the same copy/paste song structure from before continues.

With really nothing else to say about disc one, I'll just move on to the disc two section of my review.

Disc two is composed entirely of ambient...and by ambient, I mean some tracks composed mostly with horror movie samples and others that actually are straight up dark/black ambient. Unfortunately, the ones with the samples tend to get really annoying. In the first piece here, there's some woman counting from one to sixty before some beastly noise is made. I'm sorry, Aran. I appreciate the effort, but if I wanted to listen to frightening music that isn't really metal, I'd listen to Gnaw Their Tongues. I will give you some credit though; the pieces here that have no samples are actually pretty good ambient. Probably because you were trying to make them actually atmospheric and interesting instead of recreating your favorite thrillers in musical form. You know what sucks though? The fact that there's only two here without samples: "Unter den Wolken" and "Schlaflos". "Fort" tries to be different by adding some beautiful grand piano and acoustic guitar' but even then, there's still a sound of a girl gasping in horror.

'Hin-Fort' is a messenger tasked to deliver a package to its intended receiver. The contents of the package and who the receiver is are irrelevant. What is relevant is that the messenger must trek across a wilderness filled with vicious, carnivorous monsters to get to the receiver. And despite his valiant efforts, the messenger is killed by the monsters, and the package was lost forever. Don't get the metaphor? Here it is in plain English: 'Hin-Fort' could not deliver. The black metal disc may be Darkspace in spirit, but it's missing some very crucial elements if it wants to be as great as Darkspace. The ambient disc, while having a few redeeming pieces, is really uninteresting overall; and I can think of a few ambient albums much better and twice as consistent as the second disc here. I wish I could give two separate reviews for the two discts; but even then, disc one would get like a 68%, and disc two would score somewhere in the 50s. Since they're packaged together, I have to score it as a whole.

I know Aran is better than this. Lunar Aurora is proof of that. As a matter of fact, the same year Trist released 'Hin-Fort', Lunar Aurora released 'Andacht'. Go listen to that instead.