“That black dog, that old friend…” – Mizmor, “Woe Regains My Substance”
I have been shrieking for more years than I have been silent. The sound of my throat has increasingly become a croak, a ragged jag of gravel against sandpaper. Cigarettes have scratched what once used to be a smooth voice. When I scream, you will hear it. But will you listen?
Listening is an art form. It’s a science, too. It is what determines the basis of conversation, of sympathy, of empathy. Of whatever lies in between the words and determines the ways in which we will interact, love, hate. Listening is so essential to daily fucking existence that we don’t even think about it until the moment that it is no longer possible, when tinnitus takes all and tarnishes it into a shriek and white noise. Listening is the most important thing in the world to me as a musician; I die to listen, I die to be listened to. But more than listening, I yearn to understand and be understood.
And that is where I find myself with Mizmor’s – in my opinion – opus, Yodh. It is perhaps the most taunting, miserable aural experience that you can subject yourself to.
It is love.
It is hate.
It is everything in between.
It is the moments of joy and exhilaration when you first meet someone you will come to love and it is the dejection and destruction of heartbreak when that person can no longer tolerate being around you. It is finding god and losing her. It is learning that god was perhaps never even there. It is learning to hate god as much as you once loved her. Yodh is the Ur, the apex, the Everest. For me, it is the peak and the valley in one breath and one step.
Yodh is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.
It’s also the album that I love more than any other.
“I’m the iota, the fragile remainder” – Mizmor, “A Semblance Waining”
I have not had an easy life. I have done that which I should not have and seen what I wish I had not. I have said words I regret and used extremity when tenderness may have been more appropriate. I have experienced loss in such a way that the absence of something is more comforting than its former presence. This is the feeling of Yodh. It is the emotional Everest of a conglomeration of genres – doom, sludge, drone, and of course, black metal.
It is the apex of miserable musical achievement.
Some people remember the best moment of their musical listening lives with fondness. They remember the intro to “Stairway to Heaven” on hi-fi speakers when they were twelve and learning to play guitar. They remember the beginning lick to “Sweet Child O’ Mine” in their uncle’s Camry. They remember an 8 track pumping Def Leppard (sorry to you if this happened). They remember the swell of violence as they first heard metal or punk or hard rock. They remember the sound of Kurt Cobain’s shredded vocal chords on Nevermind. They remember these things because for one moment—just one moment—music mattered more than anything else in the gigantic morass of the world.
I remember the first time I heard Mizmor.
I was in grad school. I was studying to be a writer, which should tell you about my foibles more easily than me listing them. I don’t remember how I found Mizmor at first, just like you don’t remember the name of your first weed dealer in high school. All I remember was the sound of Yodh. The despondency. The misery. The honesty. The truth.
I remember hearing the sounds of ALN’s heart and brain and soul and thinking to myself one simple phrase:
“This is the beginning and the end.”
It was the beginning because I’d just discovered what would become my favorite band, a band that would lead me down the path of rediscovery with musical creation. It was the beginning because I felt fucking seen, heard, listened to. It was the beginning because I had found a friend in music that I felt certain I would never meet but who seemed to get where my mind was at as a despondent, overworked, underpaid grad student.
But it was also the end. It was the end of whatever I had thought of myself, of what I thought of myself as a lover of music. It was the end of an innocence I didn’t know I possessed. Much like ALN, I didn’t believe in god anymore, that was for sure. Neither did ALN by the time he made Yodh. But what I heard over the course of a few songs absolutely ended me.
Yeah, that one’s pretty bleak.
–ALN
I was “the fragile remainder” of whatever I thought, all because I had found a band that changed my life for the better and the worse. And I had found him at his darkest, dreariest, most despondent.
I was ready and he was willing to provide the soundtrack for my misery.
Or was I?
“Adversity the very fabric of being” – Mizmor, “The Serpent Eats Its Tail”
I hope that what I am about to say will fall on deaf ears. I hope that no one can relate.
I have wanted to die with as much passion as I have wanted to live.
And there’s no shame in that. It is the human inertia towards Hades, a constant drive towards death that leads us all to our fate. I don’t want to die now and I don’t want to die any time soon, but in all honesty, I have probably never felt this way before. There are times that, perhaps shamefully, I’ve thought of ending my sometimes futile existence. I’ve wondered if life was worth living, if it was just a charade meant to torment me until an inevitable end.
But I heard Mizmor and suddenly, in one of the darkest points in my life, I saw light. I heard a voice shrieking from oblivion. I heard a voice that spoke to my depression, my uncertain mental health. I heard a voice that could do what I did not know how to do yet. I heard the sound of misery and self-hatred and desire and frustration. I heard someone speaking what was in my heart.
It hurt then and it still hurts now.I don’t listen to Yodh and think to myself, “Now is a great time to go skipping in the daisies.” I think of despondency and desperation and heartache and loss. I think of the first time I got to ask ALN about this album. He asked me what my favorite Mizmor album was and I said “Yodh, but especially when I’m depressed and need catharsis.” His response was simple: ‘“Yeah, that one’s pretty bleak.”
The funny thing about all of this is that while Mizmor has become a band that is essential to my mental health, I also know the fucking guy. He’s a good man. A quiet man. A pensive man. His music is a reflection of that. It is honest and brutal just as much as it is comforting to a morbidly depressed mind.
It is also torture. You don’t come to Mizmor and especially not to Yodh hoping that you will “feel better.” Instead, you hope to do what we all hope to do.
You hope to survive, motherfucker.
“What sermon do I have to offer” – Mizmor, “Inertia, An Ill Compeller”
ALN is not a preacher. He is not a minister. He is not a cardinal or a pope or a rabbi or an imam. He doesn’t want to be any of those things and he will never be any of those things.
But he speaks truth to my particular religion, the religion of the individual striving to be decent in a fucked up world.
One time, I listened to Yodh in a place that is darker than you likely want to journey to. I refuse to exaggerate or pull punches. Instead, I will tell you that I sat in a bathtub of warm water with a knife. I listened to ALN and I thought to myself, “maybe this is the soundtrack to my death.”
Yodh led me to fold my knife, drain the bathtub, and dry off. It led me to believe that there was more to life. It led me to pen and paper and pick and string. It led me to writing my second album.
I think sometimes that ALN doesn’t quite understand what he does to an army of us that follow him, rapt and attendant to his every word. He’s modest – and that is a credit to ALN. It also undersells what he has done with his music.
I’m embarrassed to say this because an admittance of weakness isn’t the easy road to pride. But Yodh saved me. It let me see the light that is part of seeing the dark. It let me see the brilliance of expression and fear and joy and despondency.
Yodh saved my life.
“And now we’ve come to the crux” – Mizmor, “Bask in the Lingering”
And thus, we meet our ending and our beginning. There was a time that I thought to myself “Yodh. Yodh and nothing more.” Yodh is the beginning and the end, the apex and the epicenter. Yodh is my approximation of death. It is the sound of mercy and supplication. It is the sound that you crave and dread. For you, it may be torture. But for me it is life.
