Oblomov - Wishing the Renaissance
I found Wishing the Renaissance by Oblomov in the Metal section at Factory Records. Factory Records has a great selection of new and used vinyl, but their tapes and CDs are all pre-loved. Still, I have no clue what this disc was doing there. Oblomov is apparently a Czech black metal band that was active in the 2000s, and Factory Records is a warehouse on the edge of Dover, New Jersey, a former factory town with a beautiful Hispanic downtown. Not exactly a place known for black metal. Still, something about the disc called to me, and it was only five dollars, so I rolled the dice on this 4-song EP.
The first song is a 16-second spooky intro, so this is really more like a 3-song EP, but all three songs are twisted, progressive, and long. “Wishing the Renaissance” is, like a lot of black metal, about rejection of religion, but it’s also a bright-eyed ode to progress and to enlightenment values, which an unfortunate amount of black metal bands reject as well. “Coincidenta Oppositorum” has some incredible boinky bass riffs, and I think that beneath the occult and warlike imagery it's supposed to be a love song? This is the song with the most death metal influence on it as well with the riffs. “Panta Rhei” is also a song about love lost, the cycle of life, and the inevitable mystery at the end of it. It starts out with a dramatic drawn out passage, then some black metal tremolo picking with corny but very appropriate orchestral stabs, and then has some almost Thin Lizzy-esque chorus riffs. Oblomov guides its song from 4/4 to 6/8 to 9/8 with more fluidity than some math rock bands I know.
The mix is gloriously messy. The ride cymbal sounds like a harpsichord string. The double kick is fighting with the bass and the guitars constantly. The synths are cheap. The tempo is all over the place, pushing and pulling, but the players speed up and slow down together like a Motown backing band. These guys are true players, locked in and grooving. Is this the tightest, most technical black/death metal out there? No, but the raw flow on display on these recordings shows me that I’d rather jam with these guys than the most metronomic shredder. These guys are playing theatrical black metal in the goddamn pocket. The froggy vocals ride the line between overwrought and genuinely menacing, and while they are kind of one-note, they contribute to the overall atmosphere of dramatic, tortured gloom. The vibes on this bad boy are, as they say, immaculate. And what is black metal without vibes?
The jewel case came to me cracked and missing a corner. The plastic on the part that holds the CD itself is white, not black or clear. The cover is a grey and white blurry picture of an old building, a cloudy sky, an illegible logo, and the Vitruvian man. Overall, it’s designed to stand out among a sea of black and white photos and grimly yellowed Frazetta-esque paintings, which is probably why I picked it up in the first place. The disc itself is nothing special, just the logo and some copyright info in black and white.
In writing about this CD for the blog, I noticed something that I hadn’t before - a little “+multimedia part” on the back cover. Naturally, I popped the disc into my cd-rom drive and was pleasantly surprised to see a bunch of .htm pages. The navigation is garbage, the graphics are dated, some of the links are dead, and almost everything is in Czech. There are some press photos of four long haired dudes looking sufficiently menacing in courtyards, some interview snippets (including one in English where they complain about the nazis in the slavonic black metal scene), and - get this - their entire previous demo EP! Given the current DIY scene’s nostalgia for the early internet, I’m surprised that nobody’s doing more things like this.
Black metal is still not my thing most of the time, but this shitty little disc helped me realize just how fun it can be. This is just a bunch of European theatre kids having a blast. This EP is smudgy, goofy, grandiose, and pure of heart. Consider my eyes opened.
Wishing the Renaissance by Oblomov is a bad EP, but I like it.