Bolt Gun: Begotten | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Bolt Gun are an unusual entity, even amongst the terrifying, iconoclastic, sonic landmarks of drone, black metal and doom. I only came to them through their recent collaboration with extreme sound talent and extremely diverse artist Uboa. It gave me an inaccurate picture of a band that are, on their own, committed to the slow, unnerving and uncompromising genres that they work in and a worldview that is nothing short of flattening. These individual qualities are developed even further on their latest full length, Begotten.

Bolt Gun’s 2017 behemoth, Man Is Wolf To Man -a depiction of the brutality of life in Stalinist Russia- was widely lauded, especially in their home state of Western Australia. Perhaps the easiest description of it is one the band favoured themselves, “Like a Pink Floyd epic unfolding in some nightmarish dimension”. With its savage, growling black metal underpinnings, overlaid with sweet, endless guitar solos, that’s not a bad analogy.

Epic, prog and post-rock arcs return in Begotten, but they are from the dominating characteristic of the record. Instead the band -clearly quite self-aware when it comes to their artistic references- nail it again, describing their approach as akin to the repetitive, darkly hypnotic post-punk patterns of Swans or the endless, quasi-jazz swirling of The Necks. They really take this to heart in the record’s first two enormous cuts Existence Is Exile - Nothingness, Home and They Herd Together To Bleat Their Hopes. These are vocal free and like a blend of drone and soundtrack music, featuring only the subtlest of development.

It might take you aback, a little, after the blend of sweetness and savagery that characterised Man Is Wolf To Man, or the wide-ranging Uboa & Bolt Gun. Perhaps it’s the surging levels of nihilism that restrain the music? Sucking the energy out of the sound in a gesture of hopelessness and despair. You certainly get some of that just from song titles like How Long The Same or Crawling Like An Insect Under The Shadow Of God and a lot more if you can decipher the lyrics -delivered in a high-pitched shriek- at the end of that third number, How Long The Same.

In that track again, sussurating percussion and a crackling soundscape take up much of the space on offer, but finally everything builds to a peak of shredding guitar and vocal horror that, I’m sure, many have been waiting for. A thorough-going condemnation of the pointlessness of it all, one which I’ve encountered in a few black metal records of late, Bolt Gun’s Andrew Trevenen makes no bones about it:  “How long the same? / For in the pre-dawn / We were nothing /  And now in the silencing black / Of the end / We will simply be / Nothing again / How long the same? / Worthless.”

Dear God, only God is not dear, here. After their previous album’s comprehensive exploration of the horrors of some of the world’s most vicious atheists, Bolt Gun cast their baleful gaze on the believers and the results are just as unforgiving. You really get it in full force on the album’s final number, The Altar Of Lies Will Not Be Destroyed. A nine-minute ‘single’, it comes closest to the sound of Swans and also the old, post-rocking approach. It also gives the biggest spray to ‘The Abrahamic religions’: “From Canaan to Hebron / To a Roman cross / Drenched in blood /To the final breath / Of the Levant / From the golden thrones / Of the Holy See / To every Vatican rapist / To the spears of Edessa / We are nothing.” There’s also an allegory of burning light, the false redemption of faith, versus a welcoming, nothingness, the all-embracing void, which completes Bolt Gun’s nihilistic journey. It seems slightly ironic that the song title is a twist on a lyric from the Laibach classic, Apologia. That cut from the early ‘80s, was back when the band took their revolutionary politics even more seriously than they do now and to flip it out of Marxist dialectics and into a head-first, nihilistic dive is a grim manoeuvre indeed. Still, I suppose I can feel kindred spirits at play, between the endlessly satirical gestures of Laibach and the gruesome honesty of Bolt Gun.

Bolt Gun’s vision seems a neat fit for our contemporary experience of boredom and horror; albeit one that suffocates all hope with a grim assuredness, in these long tracts of minimal, bubbling dread, punctuated with outbursts of hysterical finger-pointing and prognostications of doom. I guess it’s final vindication -as hard as it sounds- is that I can’t really dispute the convictions of the band’s most individual and hard-eyed expression to date. So then: suffer in the light or be enveloped by darkness, the choice is yours.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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