Cassette Review #1: The Risen King, Restoration of a Troübled Heart - Güaard
"When I tell you his name, don't you dare forget it!"
[Big thank you to Cult Love for providing Fugue State with an early copy to review! - B.P.R.]
The Journey Begins
During the glitchy, synth-laced introduction of The Risen King, Restoration of a Troubled Heart, the listener is met with an admission of wrongdoing by a Voice to the titular Risen King. Everything suddenly shifts and the song takes on a more dire tone as this Voice begins addressing a group of people - followers or subjects to the King, presumably. He asks the audience to, “act as though they saw none of this,” - ‘this’ being the previously mentioned wrongdoing, more than likely. Before they “travel through this unknown journey together,” the narrator leaves them with one final message:
Although the old king has passed, the new king will soon arrive.
When I tell you his name, don’t you dare forget it.
The warning-like nature of the last line - 'When I tell you his name, don’t you dare forget it,” - left me with a great sense of unease. The line is repeated, becoming heavily distorted and slowed. It’s this repetition here and throughout the rest of the album that drives home the grave importance of this new king’s name. Just as the Voice is starting to tell the audience the name… the Voice becomes completely unintelligible. Then, silence. What lies ahead is a real treat.
IMPRESSIONS
Starting with its overall presentation, the folks over at Cult Love did a bang-up job on the packaging for this tape. The artwork, done by victimizetheworld, is absolutely phenomenal. The green is very eye-catching and plays well into the more nature-inspired aspects of the music. The additional sticker on the tape itself features two stylized ‘G’-axes from Güaard’s logo and a nice banner with silhouettes of medieval towers and churches. The flip side of the art on the inside of the cassette case lists the album’s tracks and provides an illustration of a serpent emerging from a knife’s sheath, along with the oft-repeated line, “When I say his name, don’t you dare forget it!”
Never before has a dungeon synth project so quickly caught my attention and captured my imagination. After the introduction, all I had were questions: Who does this Voice belong to? What did he do? Why must you never forget the name of the king? Despite having all of these questions, I wasn’t in the least bit worried about getting concrete answers to any of them. As the album progressed and I was given little pieces of the narrative, I found myself sitting back and filling in the gaps with my own daydreams, and I just can’t remember the last time music made me do that.
Musically, there is so much here to sink your teeth into. There are moments throughout this album’s runtime that reminded me of some of my favorite vaporwave projects of all time (runescape.wav, b e g o t t e n, Corp.), as well as some of my favorite dungeon synth black metal artists of all time (Old Nick, Urfaust, and that one band that we all know I’m thinking about but can’t say). Based solely on looking at the tape, I had a feeling that I knew what to expect going in.
What I was not expecting, however, was the occasional Gen-Z, Soundcloud-esque dabblings in the vocals. Now, I’m on the cusp of 25 and I’m still pretty unfamiliar with the world of Gen-Z internet music. I definitely wouldn’t have ever thought to combine it with lo-fi dungeon synth black metal, but I’m here to say that it actually works really well in this case. It’s not grossly overused or forcibly integrated into the tracks. It is instead used rather sparingly and is often accompanied by lush soundscapes that work in tandem to create an extremely mellow vibe at times. If this is the direction that some people my age are going to take a well-trodden genre like dungeon synth, then I don’t really have any complaints - especially if the precedent that Güaard has set is followed. It’s obvious that a lot of attention was paid to the finer details - the way the layers of the synth soundscapes are warped and chopped gives a dreamlike quality to the whole thing, while extremely distorted screaming cuts in and out with the more traditional instrumentation (drum machine, guitar, etc.). There is clear intention behind all of the decisions made on The Risen King, both in its composition and its presentation and I believe that it makes it that much more engrossing as a result.
You can buy a physical copy of the tape HERE!