Negură Bunget at The Purple Turtle

Negură Bunget at The Purple Turtle

01 December, 2008
by: Evolmike

Consider the metaphor that all music is a community, and that each genre is a family with its own estate and its own customs. Come with me and visit the extended family of Metal.

We are greeted at the door by Classic Metal. Progressive Metal shows us in, Glam Metal sycophantically takes our coat (but has no idea what to do with it) and Death Metal offers us a cup of tea (insisting that it's the blackest, most brutal tea ever conceived). In the garden we see Thrash Metal lounging in the pool on a dollar-shaped inflatable chair while Speed Metal desperately rakes the leaves from the water's surface, probably looking for drugs. We hear the screams of Emo Metal from the toilet, where it has been sitting and continually discharging ever since Nu-Metal left home. We are then approached as if from nowhere by a solemn looking individual, who sort of stands there staring at us, with an expression as much in sorrow as in anger. He knows he could be getting on with something, but instead he continues staring glassily at us, waiting patiently for a reaction. This is Black Metal, and this is Negură Bunget.

Like most black metal, Negură Bunget are typified by repeated structural guitar arpeggios, sludgy drums and high-registering screams coming together to create a primordial soup that remains fiery even when slow, and dreary even when fast. You could be forgiven for not noticing the differences between the black metal of twenty years ago and the black metal of today. There aren't many. But technology nowadays allows for some wonderfully piercing guitar noises, granting a small amount of notes their own formulaic complexity that is mysteriously engaging to the ear, delivering a controlled, euphoric ambience that was once a stranger to this definitively coarse, uncompromising subgenre.

This is all too apparent in Negură Bunget's sound. They really do milk every riff for all it's worth, allowing maximum breathing room for the gradual development of their structural patterns. They start slowly and (relatively) quietly, layering each ominous drone one at a time, creeping up on you like a monster from the shadows, and before you know it, bedlam has ensued. You hear the thunderous rattle and vicious shriek of the undead that you've come to expect, but you can barely recall when it started or predict where it will go in the next two minutes.

You see, the clear difference between high art and low art (for want of a less pompous phrase) is in lasting power, and of course subtlety. Low art sounds good the first time you hear it but only deteriorates from then on. High art just gets better and better, because of the subtleties in the arrangements that allow your attention to drift away from the music itself. Negură Bunget are not catchy. At all. But when you hear them, no matter how loud they are (and they're quite stupidly loud) your mind instinctively wanders away from the noise, sometimes towards memories that you thought you had forgotten long ago. And every time you hear it, you'll get something else from it. This is why you must listen to Negură Bunget, and conversely this is why rock is so incalculably superior to any form of pop.

Don't believe me? Visit the estate of the Pop family and see how many interesting people you meet there.

Click here for all London Metal
Click here for all London Live Music
Click here for things to do in Camden

Evolmike