Is this allowed to move me
Black Metal makes me notice a defensive habit in my listening. A phrase feels tender, and before I can enjoy the tenderness I begin asking whether I am supposed to believe it. Is this a sincere gesture, a joke about sincere gestures, a trap for the person who wants one too badly? The questions can become louder than the music.
Dean Blunt interests me because that uncertainty does not sit outside the work. It becomes part of the atmosphere. A familiar musical shape appears without all the reassuring signs that usually tell me how earnestly to receive it. I am left with the sound and my own desire for instructions.
The protection of the smirk
I think irony is often discussed as if it were an advanced form of intelligence. Sometimes it is perceptive. Sometimes it is simply a way to remain impossible to embarrass. If I never fully commit to an emotion, I can always claim that the listener who believed me missed the joke. That is a powerful kind of shelter, and a very lonely one.
What I hear in Black Metal is more interesting than a permanent smirk. The music can be affecting even while the frame around it remains unstable. I do not need to decide that every gesture is sincere before I admit that a particular sound makes me feel something. My response does not become invalid because the artist may have more than one relationship with the gesture.
There is a danger in that freedom too. Ambiguity can excuse laziness, and an audience can do so much interpretive work that almost any fragment starts looking profound. I want to keep asking whether the actual sound rewards attention. Mystery is not a substitute for musical judgment. It is one of the conditions under which judgment has to happen.
A feeling without a certificate
The record leaves me with an opinion I find difficult to practice. I do not want irony to become the price of admission to feeling. I want to be capable of being moved before I have established that nobody clever will laugh at the reason.
That does not mean abandoning skepticism. It means being skeptical of my own need to look unfooled. There is vanity in that need, a wish to remain above the scene even while pretending to engage with it. Listening should occasionally put that vanity at risk.
If a song makes a small room inside me, I can enter it without first receiving a signed statement of intention. I can still notice the strange framing, still wonder what is being concealed. The uncertainty may remain. So can the feeling.