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As someone who primarily consumes black metal during the hot summer months, I tend to view it as something that will heighten my misery. After all, black metal has the strangest texture and sound – it can be haunting, beautiful and melodic, or downright sinister to the point where you consider it to be a murder ballad. Der Rote Milan’s newest album, Moritat, not only touches upon the adventures of Schinderhannes, a German outlaw akin to Robin Hood, but it also elevates what is known as the “murder ballad”, a form of song that discusses crime or a gruesome death.
One of the first things that caught my attention was the sheer heaviness Moritat employs. While there are moments of softness, the atmosphere is heavy with dread and uncertainty. While listening to the record, I couldn’t help but like there was a noose tied around my neck, making my anxiety palpable the more the record reached completion. The music is heavy with chugging guitars and embedded vocal elements – as if the harsh vocals weren’t enough, you can also hear death rattles, signifying people’s demises. However, the heaviness isn’t just death and all his friends; it’s also highly enjoyable, making the listener want to headbang or, at the very least, tap their foot along to the beat.
Moritat is a form of concept album – it looks at various stories where Schinderhannes plays a role, and it’s set in the backdrop of the Thirty Years’ War, which, to put it lightly, was a major religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics that eventually culminated into a continuation of the France-Habsburg rivalry for political dominance. Within this setting, Schinderhannes is a folk hero who steals from the (coded as wealthy) French from one side of the Rhine to give to the (coded as poor) Germans on the other. This adds to the grimness and the macabre atmosphere on Moritat offers. What you are getting is death and blood in spades, and you have to sit through this album and wonder whether or not your hands are also covered in red.
However, it’s at final track “Moritat” where things become truly devastating. Here, the epitome of the murder ballad comes rearing its ugly head, making me think of “Mack the Knife” from The Threepenny Opera. Although “Mack the Knife” has a whimsical tone to it – it does end happily – there is a sinister undertone that underlies the character of Mack. In the Opera, he is a rapist, murderer, and seducer of underage girls – he’s a candidate for hanging. In the case of the album, “Moritat” talks about Schinderhannes’s death – or what could be considered to be his death – and ends on the harrowing note that death and destruction is upon us, slowly fading away until there is nothing left but the screams of the dead. What a way to wrap up the album.
All in all, Moritat is a powerful album whose themes of war and death seem incredibly relevant to what we are seeing today in the current political stage. Although the increasing rivalry between the U.S. and Russia seems to echo the French-Habsburg rivalry as implied on the album, Moritat make it seem more human with the story of Schinderhannes, and it allows us to feel empathy for a character who was seen as a folk hero. It’s a wonderful record, and one that will most likely land in my EOY list for black metal. Of course I need to go back and relisten to Moritat before December to see where it sits, but, for what it’s worth, I have high hopes for Der Rote Milan and I eagerly await their next record.
