You scuffle along dirty sidewalks that edge mean streets, kicking the detritus in front of you, head down and lost in your own gloomy and frustrated thoughts. Suddenly the gloom becomes a fury. Maybe you’ve walked right into someone else in your blind momentum, and the shock springs a fragile lock in your head. Maybe everything that’s been seething just suddenly reaches a violent boil of its own accord, because nothing you’ve been thinking leads to any solution, and all the agony and rage you’ve been trying to work through or suppress just won’t be held down any longer.

Repression only works for so long, and the growing pressure you’ve been trying to contain only magnifies the explosiveness of the release. Nothing is solved, no solace presents itself. But what else are you supposed to do? You eat yourself alive, or you let it go, and give the nitroglycerine in your veins something else to consume, with fire.

With emotionally powerful music, what we take away from it is always unique, because that’s an alchemical product of the immutable sounds and what’s inside of us, which is never exactly the same as what’s inside someone else, including the band who made it. The first paragraph above is just what I imagined and felt in listening to “Svinakungens sal“, the track we’re presenting today from the new album by M:40. You might get a different feeling, but whatever that might be, it’s bound to be intense — because this is a damned intense song. Continue reading »