Album Review: Ellende – “Ellenbogengesellschaft” (Post-black)

Written by Kep

Ellende has always been a project that communicated more emotion than most. The post-black stylings of the Austrian one-man outfit ebb and flow, using a juxtaposition of warm melody, pensive instrumental moments, and bloodcurdling black metal ice to compose pieces of tangible loneliness and deep sadness. There’s also been a clear progression over the years, with notable strides in songwriting and production as well as increased post-metal influence on display with each release. The Ellende before you today is a much more refined project than the one that debuted with 2012’s Rückzug in die Innerlichkeit EP, and the album is even more moving than 2019’s moving LP Lebensnehmer.

A true solo project, Ellende is the brainchild and handiwork of L.G., who not only writes and performs all instruments and vocals (excepting the live drums, which he writes but session drummer P.F. performs), but also paints all of the band’s album covers and related art. (He also wears perhaps my favorite corpse paint design ever, but that’s neither here nor there.) His greatest strength has always been an ability create a unified and complete experience for the project’s audience, matching visual elements to instrumentation, songwriting, and production in a cohesive way. For example, the self-titled debut’s bleak black-and-white charcoal landscape was the ideal match for the album’s rougher production, nature-themed lyrics, and windswept melodies. The cover for Ellenbogengesellschaft is a bit less obvious, with its lushly detailed painting of an aristocratic-looking boar in old time finery, and yet the title’s translation brings the concept into focus. “Ellenbogengesellschaft”, literally “elbow society”, means roughly the same thing as “dog-eat-dog world” or “everyone for himself society”, and so the boar as the traditional rich hunter’s prey in the sarcastic finery of the upper class is a fascinating choice for a set of tracks that focus on vulnerability, loneliness, and emotional exhaustion.

For this, the band’s fourth full-length record and seventh release overall, L.G. has added a couple of new elements to Ellende’s soundscape. The biggest of these is harmonized “choral” vocals, which make an appearance on several tracks, sometimes as the featured vocals in the moment and others as a layered element. It’s quite an expansion of musical boundaries for the project, which has never featured cleans of any sort, and the addition is on display right from the start as a passage of wordless vocal harmonies highlights piano-centric intro track “Ich bin” (“I am”). It’s a pleasure every time they return across the record, but I enjoyed them most as a highlight to the longing of “Someday” and in their turn as a mournful counterpart to the agonized screams in the middle of lead single “Abschied”. 

The single most impressive part of Ellenbogengesellschaft, though, is simply that the tracks are beautifully written, with waves of  passion and fury and exhaustion and loneliness and despondency and bitterness all depicted in the rise and fall of songs that feel as though they’re alive and breathing. Take “Ruhelos” (“Rest-less”), which features a guest appearance from vocalist J.J. of fellow Austrian post-black outfit Harakiri for the Sky. The lengthy opening section is a thoughtful strummed chord progression with an undercurrent of urgency upon which a melody is layered and grown. A drum fill leads into the track’s main body, J.J.’s anguished screams leading and then giving way to L.G.’s higher, hoarser shrieks. It progresses through a more expansive section without breaking tempo, fascinating drum patterns at the forefront, the two vocalists scream as a pair on more than one occasion, and there’s an elegant passage of those clean choral harmonies before the track soars to its climactic finish as all the clean and both harsh vocals layer atop one another. It’s emblematic of the album, bringing to life waves of emotion, making them feel genuine and relatable. 

L.G.’s lyrics, mostly in German but periodically peppered with English lines, are likewise tied tightly into the trajectory and composition of the songs, an inseparable part of the whole. “Unsterblich” (“Immortal”), for example, builds a narrative that begins with an intense traditional black metal passage as the speaker discusses the concept of finite life and saying that they’re not ready for it to end yet. It moves through crashing turmoil, lyrically and musically, then arpeggiated acoustic guitar piano introduce a moment of reflection: “I’ve been alive too long / To hide the pain hurts even more”. The final stretch of wounded frenzy arrives in the fury of a thunderstorm as the tremolos, blasts, and words all come to a violent denouement: “Es gibt hier nichts mehr zu sammeln, in diesen Tod will ich geh’n / Lieber ein kurzes Leben als Freunde gehen seh’n / Ein Fleisch verdirbt durch Einsamkeit, nicht Ewigkeit”, which means “There is nothing more to collect here, I want to go to this death / Better a short life than to see friends go / A flesh perishes through loneliness, not eternity”. Chills. 

Suffice it to say that if you like well-written post-black metal, the kind where each moment is painstakingly crafted to bare part of the artist’s soul, then Ellenbogengesellschaft is for you. It’s the best Ellende release yet by a comfortable margin, somehow better than the sum of its impressive parts. There are icy blades of high second wave riffing and sweeping atmoblack melodies in songs like “Hand aufs Herz” (“Hand on heart”), and delightfully nuanced drum parts that bring life to post-black majesty—check out the extended 6/8 against 3/4 pattern in “Abschied” (“Parting”). The album’s heartrending final track “Verletzlich” (“Vulnerable”) even ends with spoken word samples pulled from a 1966 interview with painter Francis Bacon—the final words of the excerpt are “All art has now become completely a game by which man distracts himself”—before the ambient sounds of a train crossing close the 49-minute experience. It’s a package that needs to be heard in one sitting to best appreciate its intimate and affecting vision. 

THE BOTTOM LINE

There’s a new member in the pantheon of essential post-black metal albums: Ellende’s Ellenbogengesellschaft is an essentially flawless record, one in which each and every element is carefully and meaningfully placed. It’s a notable progression and improvement on the previous releases in the project’s outstanding catalogue, and it’s not to be missed by any fan of the style.