Anna von Hausswolff - Dead Magic

This album has been a monster to get to, and for positive reasons. It’s dense and loud, soft and chilling, and it moves through so many eerie, yet beautiful, moods. I had to keep returning to it over and over because I felt each time like I couldn’t quite grasp what was going on overall and I didn’t want to miss and subsequently neglect anything. Though not exactly a pedigree metal album, Dead Magic accomplishes a number of metallic feats better than many pure breed metal albums out there.

Immediate thoughts of Chelsea Wolfe come to mind from the album’s sheer darkness and hauntingly subtle use of the most goth-friendly of metal. Yet Anna takes a step further into surefire freak folk territory in a number of ways, vocally and instrumentally. 

With only five tracks of varying length and style, Dead Magic is still a tough machine to break down and it’s an album that can take on a variety of moods in a number of different contexts. I’ll say that in the now numerous listens I’ve given the album, each experience has been unique in some way, and I love an album that has the power to speak in multiple voices depending on its environment. It makes the album exciting, and it makes Dead Magic a joy and a more ambient thrill to listen to.

“The Truth, The Glow, The Fall” opens the album with a drone-y, ambient swell of organ and some echo-y guitar that adds an element of darkness to the song’s pretty soundscape, with vocals immediately reminding me of the characteristic quivering style of singing sometimes applied by Angel Olsen. Though it stays at a rather slow-tempo, it doesn’t wallow in one mood, and Anna employs some raspy high vocals in the latter half that add an element of freak folk to the song’s flair. Long and sprawling, it finishes off with a slow, winding drone of bells, strings, and echoed chimes that finishes setting the tone of the album nicely.

“The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra” ups the intensity immediately after with consistently pounding percussion and distinctly freakier and louder vocal performances from Anna, with a metronomic low guitar strum used in an almost similarly percussive manner, the song makes excellent use of its six minutes and eventually divulges into a transcendent climax made all the more enthralling by Anna’s incredible high notes.

The third song, “Ugly and Vengeful” is possibly the most overtly dark and haunting on the album and it makes for hardly a concise affair in the process. Expansive and epic, it takes its sweet, brooding time warming up and floating into its eeriely cultivated ambiance, which eventually escalates into a kick-drum-led drone guitar assault that feels like a hundred ghosts encircling the body and sucking the soul out from the skin, in a good way. It’s when Anna and the beating of the toms are alone that her shriek brings the song and the album to its full-bodied crescendo, and God it is frightful and gorgeous.

“The Marble Eye”, the album’s fourth and shortest track, leads with a finely gothic, but ethereal, organ and string melody that slowly ascends from lower to higher chords, moving the mood from spooky to something uncertain but heavenly. It’s more of an instrumental interlude compared to the other tracks on the album, but it still makes its presence deserved.

“Kallans Ateruppstandelse“ wraps the album up in relatively concise fashion, more ambient than doomy, a somber and very slow-paced string-driven track with von Hausswolff sounding like she’s summoning an elven healing spell or something. It’s beautiful, and the only track on the album that holds on to a bright, shimmering beauty for its entirety, a fitting conclusion to the madness brought forth by the songs preceding it.

From start to finish, Dead Magic is an incredible, fascinating listen, and definitely a favorite of the year for me, well worth the time taken to get to know it. It’s not a record that makes its relationship with metal on the most tangible of terms, but there is more that is indeed familiar to the world of metal than what meets the eye, and plenty more to appreciate beyond its metallic elements.