Album Of The Week: Blut Aus Nord – 777: The Desanctification

Here are the facts as we know them: Blut Aus Nord is the one-man black metal project of a Frenchman who calls himself Vindsval. Vindsval debuted his whole thing in 1994, but he has allowed the public to learn basically nothing about him in the years since, which is fine, since guys who make black metal often turn out to be either (1) sociopaths or (2) boring nerds. (There are even some boring nerd sociopaths.) I hadn't heard of him before this year, when he released the first two volumes of his 777 album trilogy, which is getting some good press for pushing black metal into unexpected places. Even so, I didn't give it a chance until yesterday, when my friend and Stereogum predecessor Brandon Stosuy called both parts of 777, collectively, his favorite metal album of the year in his Pitchfork column. Brandon's right. I couldn't much get into Sect(s), the first 777 volume, because it sounded, to my ears anyway, like so much of the black metal I've tried and failed to like in the past six years or so. But The Desanctification, the new one, will probably turn out to be my favorite black metal album of the past few years, mostly because it jettisons the stuff I don't like about the genre while keeping the stuff I like intact.