I'm a terrible nihilist. I love things too much. The sad, ebullient truth is that I listen to dark music not to align with any true kvlt conspiracy against all life, but because at its best this music has the potential to explain the void as air, to raise nuance from the contours of emptiness. I'm not trying to escape or obliterate anything, I'm trying to understand resistance as love. And thus yearning and catharsis are as metal to me as head-grinding and apocalypse, and love is always ultimately greater than death, and love metal is a perfectly tremendous idea. And of course a fearless gothic-romantic ode to joy can be both guileless roaring grandeur and unflinching invitational frailty.

"Extreme", most of the time, is as much a set of stylstics conventions as any other genre label. But occasionally it actually means what it means in English. Or in Norwegian, where apparently it has something to do with imagining what Trinacria might have sounded like as a project for Sigur Rós, Life Without Buildings and Thought Industry.

But genre-boundedness is not inherently a virtue or a flaw, and anthemic apotheosis can be forged in iron and blastbeats as truly as in chaos and spark,

and there's a reason the Norse gods loved hammers.

And if I'm guilty of putting triumphant return over calm constancy, and novelty and surprise over confirmation of mastery, then only barely.

Classic virtues are the necessary context for dissent, and at least half of all revolutions are recenterings,

and sometimes the forgotten paths are found by the lost.

We stand on coasts, silhouetting ourselves against featurelessness,

or we hold still to show the trees how it can be a victory of will.

And then we race each other back into the lights.

You should never trust a #1 that wasn't even on your first draft, much less one you hadn't even heard until after your first draft. Unless, I guess, the advance single was going to be your #1 song, and the album can change, in a week and a half, what kind of year you think you've had. This may be the chiming monument for gracious optimism that Del Amitri's Waking Hours was for tragic melancholy, or the reclaiming of Christmas music for impish paganism, and perhaps an even more profound testament than all that Norwegian metal that my experience of music has become not non-verbal but meta-linguistic.

But how many times did we need to learn that lesson, anyway? That the words in music are less text than texture, and that like everything else, they scatter like seeds in order to carry a single truth?

We travel in search of not better answers, but more expansive questions, or simpler dobuts,

and then the bravest thing we do is come back home to everything we know.

And if everything important is hiding somewhere inside of us,

then our real journey is to follow our own blood,

through its cadences

until we learn to hear its rush as silence.

And in that silence, a pulse is again the beginning,

and each time we begin again, we come closer to accepting what we have always believed.

So these are some of our lessons, maybe: there's no reason you can't start with the chorus, but neither is there any reason the chorus has to be the best part;

Sometimes you should just do the one thing you want to do most;

We are lingering disciples of patterns we used to mistake for gods;

We are biographied in footnotes;

We are most ourselves in the interstices between examined moments;

We are collectors of forgetting;

We are stenographers of our own myths.

We spend half of our lives learning to encrypt our assumptions,

and can't always admit the simplest things we know,

but then somehow each time we ask ourselves who we are, we realize someting new about what we mean.