DEAD RAVEN CHOIR

My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind
An album of black metal covers of country and folk songs released by the Aurora Borealis label on CD and vinyl. There are 300 copies on transparent mud vinyl and 600 on black. Two of the songs are available for download on Dead Raven Choir's Myspace page and one more is available on the Aurora Borealis and Southern pages.

Kigi Wa Haru
Our Mother The Mountain
A Rosebud In June
Genesis Hall
Sheep-crook, Black Dog
It's All Right With Me
The Trees They Grow So High
Favorite
Bluenose
From The Stars

Reviews

Documents
December 12, 2007
Author: Valter
That Polish musician Smolken creates corroded Black Metal cover versions of Folk songs - either traditional songs or songs of 'invented tradition' - stands to reason.
After all, the Black Metal has used elements of Folk since the former genre's infancy: just think of Ulver's 1995 album "Bergtatt", which incorporated acoustic folk guitar playing and frilly blouses. And, judging from mp3 blogs such as "Blodvargr", Black Metal now has such unlikely bedfellows as 'alpine folk', 'apocalyptic folk', 'neofolk' and 'nordic folk'. European Folk is one of the strands of Black Metal's 'spider's web of significance'.
And as for covering American folk songs by Fairport Convention's Richard Thompson and Townes Van Zandt - I see that as a return to the origins of Black Metal - isn't traditional American country music one of the formative influences on Rock, which eventually transformed into Black Metal, amongst others?
So I repeat - that Dead Raven Choir fashions an aesthetic unity out of the two genres is not in itself surprising.
But playing a Black Metal cover of one of the classics of the Cole Porter songbook - "It's All Right With Me" - that is odd! Cole Porter, that means: show tunes, musical comedies, sophistication, socialites, homosexuality and Broadway. Few musics could be more at odds with Black Metal than the Cole Porter songbook.
Many a reviewer has expressed the suspicion that Smolken is lampooning the songs that he covers in his unique fashion. In a review of Wolfmangler's "Cooking With Wolves" in Wire 284 Edwin Pouncey writes: "There is a grim determination at work here that makes it hard to tell if Smolken despises or secretly adores his chosen victims - or whether this is all some elaborate jape to raise the hackles of those fans who might feel 20th century Broadway classics and the work of the author GK Chesterton (to name two influences) have no place in the underworld of Black Metal". Sam Davies writes about "My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind" in Wire 285: "There's something very deadpan about Dead Raven Choir. They scratch away at the extreme limits of scorched-earth harshness with enough determination for any Metal fan, but at the same time hold out the possibility of a very subtle send-up. Its trebly tinniness subverts the normal smothering sludge of the genre, and in its pillaging of folk forms seems to [be] deliberately toying with fey wispiness".
In "The Pleasure Of The Text" Roland Barthes writes that there is a break or fissure in the writings of the Marquis De Sade. On the one side of that break is a good, moral text which faithfully copies a canonical model; and on the other side is a empty, mobile text which subverts the canonical text.
The same break can be found in Dead Raven Choir's music. For Pouncey, Black Metal is the text which subverts 20th century Broadway classics; for Davies, trebly tinniness, folk forms and their fey wispiness seem to subvert Black Metal.
That leads me to conclude that, while the break still exists in Dead Raven Choir's music, the question which side is which has become indeterminable. Both Black Metal and 20th century Broadway classics function as canonical text; both Black Metal and 20th century are a subversive text which satirizes the canonical text. Could it be said that Dead Raven Choir is hyper-Sadean music?
The information about Dead Raven Choir on the bands MySpace page seems to suggest that Smolken makes his music quite in earnest: "DEAD RAVEN CHOIR is a horrid blight upon black metal and does great damage to credible black metal artists everywhere. Or perhaps it's keeping black metal alive and interesting. DEAD RAVEN CHOIR doesn't care which it is, just plays black metal covers of country and folk songs".
What if we interpret the cover version of Cole Porter's "It's All Right With Me" just as earnestly?
The performer of the song's lyrics plays the role of a jilted lover who seeks forgetfulness in someone else's arms, knowing very well the wrongness of his actions. Loneliness and a sense of being-out-of-place pervade the song. Cole Porter himself - a homosexual in an age in which such a sexual orientation was tolerated at best - suffered from severe depressions: Wikipedia states that he was one of the first people who experienced electric shock therapy. Furthermore, a riding accident crushed his legs and left him in chronic pain, largely crippled; in the end, the legs had to be amputated.
For me, Dead Raven Choir's cover brings out the depressive aspect of "It's All Right With Me", an aspect which remains latent in most it's performances. The sombre, distorted and stunted sound of Dead Raven Choir's unique and inspiring brand of Black Metal is in tune with these hidden currents in one of Cole Porter's greatest hits.

Foxy Digitalis
February 12, 2008
Author: Jan-Arne Sohns
Rating: 9/10
My, oh my. Grimmest album in a long time. Best collection of cover versions that i can think of. For My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind, Smolken has recorded black metal versions of, nay, assaults on country and folk tunes. Thus, traditionals like A Rosebud in June or Sheep-Crook, Black Dog get the abrasive treatment, together with tracks by artists as diverse as Neko Case, Townes van Zandt, Japanese songwriter Kazuki Tomokawa, and Cole Porter (!). If you should think this selection was eccentric or eclectic, well, it is, but wait until you hear the actual versions.
While Smolken usually leant to the slower side of doom with his Wolfmangler project, Dead Raven Choir has never shied away from folkier atmospheres and mid-tempo parts. This release, I think, sees DRC move deep into Wolfmangler territory, as Smolken squeals his way from Tomokawas Kigi Wa Haru through to G-Frenzys From the Stars (the original featured on the Eel Creek cdr on Pseudoarcana): There is, in true Wolfmangler fashion, no guitar used on this recording. Metal sounds better without guitars has become Smolkens credo, and this album definitely is a case in point. Its all about bass, then, and bass fiddle. Smolkens characteristic approach to that instrument is well known, at least since his Dwelling In a Dead Raven for the Glory of Crucified Wolves album under the Wolfmangler moniker. At times the screeching noises remind me of Johannes Frisch, who, as part of Kammerflimmer Kollektief, also sometimes appears to strangle his instrument especially when he stands hunchbacked to manipulate the bass neck with a strings loose end. But while Frisch usually remains within a clearly defined experimental, academic framework, Smolken has apparently stepped out into Eastern European woods and into a genre for which dementedness has become a stock praise in record reviews. The technology used to record this album points into the same direction. Everything was recorded using a Polish stereo microphone from the 1970s, the press release quotes Smolken, mixed and mastered using headphones of roughly the same age and provenance and a more modern pair of PC speakers which I got for free from a guy who paid about $6 for them. Indeed, production quality isnt exactly a selling point here (or at least not in any conventional sense), meaning that the info on the albums genesis is either correct or at least made up brilliantly. It truly is an unbelievable listening experience. And theres even more to come a collection of country cover versions is apparently already recorded. Expect a Smolkenian rendition of Folsom Prison Blues.

Aquarius
February 8, 2008
Holy crap. 30 seconds into track one of this new Dead Raven Choir opus and we're like, what the heck is goin' on? Is this really our Polish pal Smolken, the avant-folk poetry-readin' cd-r makin' black metal lovin' weirdo?? Well it must be, but that track he sure sounds like some sore-throated Japanese man, fronting an intense industrial distorto-drone metallic pipe-fight dirgerock explosion, with the sawing strings of a cello (or bass) suggesting the funereal-folk of another Smolken project, Wolfmangler.
It's not like Dead Raven Choir wasn't scary before, either in acoustic Eastern European Jandek mode or doing the (Cask Strength) black-metal-as-sheer-noise thing, but good grief! In some ways, this is the perfect, sick hybrid of those two approaches, sounding something like a weird-folk version of Khanate or SUNNO))), with blown-out bulldozer bass frequencies utterly overrunning songs that Smolken probably originally composed on acoustic guitar, sitting on a back porch somewhere, staring at the sunset. What could have been sparse folk numbers are instead fully distorted and doomful and get a big thumbs up from us.
Ok, we must admit we wrote all that before bothering to look at the song titles (or read the press-release). Now we know why some of these tunes maybe somehow sounded slightly familiar, or as if transposed from a less-dire domain... he didn't compose very many of 'em at all, instead My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind is for the most part an album of covers! 7 out of the 10 tracks here are Dead Raven Choir interpretations of some of Smolken's favorite country, folk, and popular tunes by artists/victims as dissimilar as Richard Thompson and Cole Porter (!!). They're all done in Smolken's special skewed style of outsider black metal, as described above, and needless to say most of 'em are darn close to unrecognizable! We liked this a lot to begin with, now we're even more into it knowing we're actually hearing songs by late great country western songwriter Townes Van Zandt (Smolken used to live in Texas after all), alt-country chanteuse Neko Case ("Favorite"), and even obscure New Zealand drone-pop artist G-Frenzy ("From The Stars", a song that originally appeared on an out-of-print PseudoArcana cd-r we reviewed a few years back). There's also a maritime ballad by Stan Rogers, and oh yeah, the vocals on that very first track sound Japanese 'cause it's a song, "Kigi Wa Haru", by PSF-label folk troubadour Kazuki Tomokawa, an sensible choice on Smolken's part since Tomokawa's work aligns closely with that of Kan Mikami, with whom we've compared DRC's starker acoustic guitar n' vocals tracks before.
And if you like this as much as we do, you'll be happy to learn that he has another, all-country-covers album coming up, entitled Lonesome Drinking Metal...

MetalBite
January 25, 2008
Author: Mario
Rating: 9.2
I thought everything has already been done in atmospheric music, but no! The material presented here is what the band' website claims to be "black metal covers of country and folk songs." To my big surprise Dead Raven Choir achieved something quite amusing and shocking to my senses; they actually proved that some innovations are still possible to occur, innovations that grab that more sensitive part of a listener.
Smolten, the man in charge here, used an unorthodox instrumentation [bowed bass fiddle along with distorted bass guitar, drums & screams] to haunt us with unprecedented, unheard of to me before sonic picture of eastern European folklore. The main recognizable factor here is the foreboding, eerie mood, climate that freezes me if only by recollecting it from my memory of countless listenings. I have checked it myself and I tell you this, for the best result listen to it during our nature' dead time, preferably in woods surrounded by flying ravens. It adds that extra effect on you.
Please, judge for yourself if DRCh are true in what they do. As for me the whole aura surrounding the band won my attention and I'm willing to check their next offering when it arrives. This is very mandatory listen!
Categorical Rating Breakdown
Musicianship: 9
Atmosphere: 10
Originality: 10
Production: 8
Overall: 9

Heathen Harvest
September 15, 2008
Author: Richter
The first glance at the digipack containing the album My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind by the Polish act Dead Raven Choir told me what to expect of the music. Some miserably produced nazi-black-metal. I was wrong. What I heard is not black-metal, though it positively is inspired by this cold callous music.
This piece of art created by the grim fellow Smolken is none other but a set of covers on different folk and country songs. I dont know the original versions, and I doubt that the reader knows them, but Ill name some titles: Kigi Wa Haru by the Japanese songwriter Kazuki Tomokawa, Our Mother The Mountain by Townes van Zandt and for instance It's All Right With Me by Cole Porter. That last guy is known to have been gay, and in all reviews I read on this album there was an exclamation mark after his name. What do I care about him and his sexual preferences? I have this CD, and I will never try to make out what Smolken is screeching about or why he chose this or that song.
As Ive said, its not metal for me, as there is not a single note played on the guitar. Smolken abuses his double bass. The result is devastating very true, very raw abrasive sound can make people from Darkthrone or Khanate really jealous. To add to the whole disaster, Smolken used for the recording the equipment from the seventies so the production is shitty. So shitty that you have to try your hardest to hear the tunes, which are upon the whole really nice, especially in Bluenose where Smolken sings with beautiful clear voice similar to that of great Quorton. I mean, this music is truly far from sold out and thats the best and the worst about it. The best because this makes the album really unique. Maybe in some years this will be a classic, who knows. The worst because very often the music is buried under layers of noise. I realize that was the aim of Smolken, but in my opinion music must entertain. This record, though I repeat there are great songs here, tortures the listener, grinds his nerves, scorches his ears anything, but it does not entertain. Maybe its because I am a sad grindcore oriented nut but then, this record must be sold only to the guys with the label Grim and necro or True and evil tattooed on their foreheads. If You are one of those get this record it will give You loads of pleasure.