Harakiri for the Sky - "Scorched Earth"

Be the void you wanna see in the world

Sometimes you find an artist or an album that takes you by surprise and you need more, so you go looking. Last year’s Alcest release was one such surprise for me; while I love Post-Metal and Shoegaze, I was initially uncertain of how the Black Metal spin on those genres would play out.

But holy FUCK, that album was gorgeous.

So when, in reviewing my (scant) options for January, I spotted the Post-Black act Harakiri for the Sky, I figured it was worth rolling the dice again. And they certainly pulled through with incredible cover art, at the very least.

Harakiri for the Sky is an Austrian duo comprised of multi-instrumentalist Matthias Sollak (“MS”; ex-Bifrost) and vocalist Michael Wahntraum (“JJ”). They have a steady lineup of touring musicians, as well, but the core band is just the pair of them. The band’s name derives from a form of suicidal disemboweling which, conceptually, comes from Japan; it is better known as “seppuku”, but that word encompasses more of the traditional, ritualistic aspects of that particular style of suicide, while the rarely-used “harakiri” more specifically refers to the action of slicing open the stomach. According to an old interview with Metal Imperium, MS has stated that the band’s name came from a dream that JJ had in which he leapt off of a cliff, stabbed himself, and then started to fly.

Yeah, Black Metal isn’t something you listen to for warm-and-fuzzies.

Harakiri for the Sky originally formed in 2011, and Scorched Earth is their sixth studio album.

The duo’s collective experience and skill is on full display throughout the album, with very tight composition and a lot of sections that sound very technical. The songs build and release and build again, like living, breathing creations — something scaly, though, as the heavier sections are abrasive, especially compared to the majestic tranquility of Alcest’s Les Chants de l’Aurore.

But, given the difference in subject matter, that’s to be expected. Alcest’s album was very hopeful, focusing metaphorically, tonally, and literally on the rising sun and the concepts of a new day and brighter tomorrow. As mentioned above, Harakiri for the Sky takes its name from an ingrained fascination with death and suicide, and the band spends a lot of their creative focus in the orbit of topics like mental health and despair.

Opening track “Heal Me”, for example, includes the lines “You won’t find healing/At the feet of those who broke you” and “I woke up tired a few years ago/And never really recovered since” and “Be the void you wanna see in the world”. A few songs later, “With Autumn I’ll Surrender” utilizes the following image:

Maybe you think that I got thorns on my tongue
Cause of the words that I said or the way I spoke
But my heart was just growing roses
My heart was always searching for a place in the sun

On the whole, the lyricism throughout Scorched Earth is incredibly solid. It’s poetic, but not unapproachable. The downside here is that JJ’s vocals are all harsh — there are no clean lines,¹ so actually understanding the lyrics while listening to the song isn’t the easiest thing. Add to that the fact that the shortest of the album’s seven original tracks (excluding the cover) is just shy of eight minutes in length, and Scorched Earth finds itself in a position that is somewhat inaccessible for newbies to the Metal supergenre.

But I have to underscore, though, that the album still has many moments of truly surreal, almost divine beauty. The harsh sections are acidic and probably off-putting to most, but then you break through into these moments of clarity where the instrumentation pares back into just an ethereal melody, like stepping from a predator-filled jungle into a safe haven with nothing but stars and an aurora overhead. It’s a chance to catch your breath before diving back in to continue the fight.

Scorched Earth isn’t exactly what I was going for when I picked it up, but I do not regret it in the slightest. I might need to be in the right mood to truly savor it, but it’s very good. I’m definitely dropping this onto my work playlist.

Rating: Green

1. The exception here is with the album’s closing track, a cover of Radiohead’s “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”, which is sung in all clean vocals. The funny thing here is that I recognized the song from Stream of Passion’s cover; I’d never heard Radiohead’s original until now. If I’m being completely honest, Radiohead’s original sounds very underwhelming when you’re accustomed to the Stream of Passion version. Marcela Bovio makes most other vocalists sound bland, though, to be completely fair.