Dragon Metal Constellation
Discussing the kingpins of the Latvian Underground Metal scene
Imagine Latvia, specifically late 90s, post-Soviet-era Latvia. A country that, while not exactly exempt from its share of economical problems and turbulence derived from the fall of the Soviet Union, did significantly well in the long run compared to other post-Soviet countries - although that’s generally the case for the Baltics as a whole for a handful of reasons. Despite that, however, it’s not exactly the kind of country that you’d expect to be the birthplace of some of the Baltics’ most prominent Metal bands, is it?
Today, I want to discuss one such band, perhaps my favourite of the bunch: Heresiarh, Latvian capital city Rīga’s very own underground legends as well as harbingers of Dragon Metal magick - that’s what they used to refer to their music as. We’ll be tackling that later on.
“Kings of the Latvian Metal Underground”
As a band, the origins of Heresiarh are arguably as old as the Latvian Metal underground itself, if not directly tied to it. Don’t forget that we’re talking about a band that emerged out of a post-Soviet state here. To help you get a glimpse of how hard fans of the heavier side of music had it at the time in the region: the very first Metal album produced within Russia was the debut album by Thy Repentance, which was released in late 1996 and distributed only within the borders of the CIS territories. Before that, MetalAgen Records, the very first Metal-oriented record label to come out of the USSR, was founded in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, and released records by bands coming out of the domestic Russian scene of the 1990s such as the debut album by Muscovite Death Metal band Death Vomit as well as tapes by bands like Necrocannibal, a fairly underground Russian Death Metal band, and Gods Tower, a Pagan/Folk Metal band out of Belarus. They were basically all over the place and put a decent amount of noteworthy bands on the map.
Things gradually started to pick up and countries such as Poland and Ukraine developed their very own national scenes as the years went on, but before that there wasn’t much of a scene to talk about when it came to heavy music, and that’s a major gripe I have on the matter: while the Yugoslavs managed to gradually establish a solid underground scene of Punk, Goth and Experimental bands - some of which managed to get over a million views on YouTube like Pauk - at least until the Wars that raged throughout the Balkans in the 1990s started, people on the other side of the Iron Curtain never managed to do that: there doesn’t seem to be much of a “Soviet Metal scene” to talk about before the 90s, and believe me when I say I tried to do my research on the subject.
Like many of those involved with the scene at the time, the people that would go on to form Heresiarh in 1997 came from other bands directly tied to the local underground such as Dark Reign and Alfheim. Assuming that information on such acts is almost non-existent would be an understatement, but luckily an old interview published by Vae Solis Webzine with the band’s then-vocalist and keyboardist Jānis “Morgueldar” Balodis comes to rescue. According to him, Alfheim ended up being takenover by vocalist Skygge, who renamed it to Blizzard. Two demo tapes were officially released before the band folded in 1999. On the other hand, Dark Reign formed in 1994 and was effectively the very first Latvian Black Metal band and suffered the same fate of many bands that come very early into a scene that’s yet to be formed, with endless line-up changes and internal quarrels acting as the final nail in the coffin. Not exactly anything worth remembering you may say, but bear with me.
See, many musicians will probably be inclined to say that there is no real ‘process’ to music making, or at least there’s no method that’s perceived to be universally valid for every composer. You could essentially boil it down to one idea, leading to other ideas which will develop into their final form after an unspecified amount of changes, and that seems to be the case here. Out of these two bands, I would argue that Dark Reign, while not being exactly remarkable since there are no officially released recordings to their name, are slightly less forgettable than Alfheim since the musical basis for what was to come with Heresiarh was created when half the band was essentially made up by future founding members of the band. As the fact that the band was nearing its end became progressively more evident, the people in question decided to keep the core sound of the music they had created up until that point and transform it to fit the idea and the vision they had at the time. This led to the band entering Phoenix Studio in late December 1997 and recording:
Heresiarh - Dragons Of War (Elven Witchcraft, 1998)
Released in 1998 by the band via Elven Witchcraft, a tape label and underground distro that Balodis operated between the late 1990s and the first half of the 2000s, Dragons Of War is the the debut demo by Heresiarh and it comes with 6 full songs, ranging from 2 to 6 minutes in length, + 1 additional secret live recording consisting of a Metal rendition of a traditional Latvian folk song.
It’s possibly their most notorious recording to date and if you happen to be someone or know someone who’s aware of this band, chances are it’s because of this demo, which is saying a lot if you consider that, according to the band, its original purpose was only to act as an interlude between the more complex material to come and the older, significantly less elaborate songs originally composed for Dark Reign - presented here. Despite this, the music on Dragons Of War is anything but simplistic. As soon as the listener throws a copy of this tape on the stereo and presses the play button, they’re met with layers of complex instrumentation mixing acoustic passages, synth sections, and moments where the blitzkrieg sound of the buzzing electric guitars takes the soundscape by storm, the highlights of which I consider to be the songs “The Cruel Bard” and “Dragons Domain”. I’d also recommend paying attention to the lyrics, especially if you’re fond of Fantasy literature à la Lord Of The Rings, The Sword Of Shannara, Dragonsbane - I mean, the cover artwork used for the demo is basically lifted off an illustration that American artist Michael Whelan created for the Barbara Hambly novel in 1985 - and the like, as that’s the kind of topics they revolve around - as the band themselves dubbed it: Dragon Metal.
While there are no confirmations of what I’m about to say, it’s safe to assume that Dragons Of War was a rare success in the Metal underground. The demo made the rounds in the European Metal underground as well as in its tape trading network to the point where more than 500 copies where pressed and spread by Elven Witchcraft. I happen to have two copies of it, both of which are numbered - one is #518 and the other one is #783. Believe me when I say this is A LOT for an underground Metal band. Most of the other tapes I have that are roughly from the same era as this were either limited to 250 to 300 copies or just don’t come close to what Heresiarh did.
However, despite its relative success after its release sometime in 1998, one aspect that characterized the band ever since its inception was its ambitious goals; a single demo tape wasn’t cutting it for them and their end goal had always been to release an album, something which would happen 2 years later in the form of a debut CD titled:
Heresiarh - Mythical Beasts and Mediaeval Warfare (Demolition Records, 2000)
This album took the band some time to get out. At first, it was apparently meant to be released by German label Invasion Records, responsible for releasing albums by bands such as Norway’s Limbonic Art and Sweden’s Vargavinter with possibly some of the worst cover artworks that mankind has ever known - see for yourself - but apparently the label folded before the CD could be released without much notice from the guy who ran it. After that, it was the turn of British labels Attack Music, on which I managed to find exactly 0 information, and then Demolition Records, responsible for releasing the album.
As an album, I think that Mythical Beasts… is one of the biggest ‘what ifs’ of the Metal Underground as a whole. I personally don’t know of anybody who owns a copy of this album - on the other hand, I know of several people who own the demo tape - and I don’t think it has ever been brought in the few conversations I’ve had about the band. That might be due to an unspecified amount of problems, my main suspect being the fact that the label probably didn’t do much to give it proper promotion in the underground circuit. At the same time, I can think of another reason why Heresiarh’s seemingly most ambitious release isn’t held to the same high regard of their first demo: the production. Mind you, the way the demo was mixed isn’t the best, but it’s still leagues above the way this album sounds. That’s especially the case for the drums - and to be more specific the snare, which literally sounds like bubble wrap - and the guitars: way too heavy on the treble and bass frequency, to the point where they even manage to squash the bass sound out of the mix. I could go on forever, but there’s not much that can be done about it, so take it for what it is. What they didn’t accomplish with the sound, they did with the actual songs: half the songs on this CD are reworked and rerecorded versions of the demo tracks, but nevertheless you can notice the significant improvements that have been made. The synth sections, though a bit kitsch at times, are significantly more complex and varied in terms of sound and the same can be said about the sections where guitars are the main element.
In spite of all its evident flaws, Mythical Beasts And Mediaeval Warfare is a very solid endeavour to try and does justice to the band’s original goal. If you like your Metal with a slight hint of complexity in the arrangements, this is for you. Just bear in mind that it was probably recorded on a budget.
This is apparently where the days of Heresiarh come to an end, the band would go on rehearsing and playing a handful of shows - including the ‘Baltic Thunder’ 1999 Tour along with other seminal Baltic Metal acts such as Loits and Dissimulation - throughout the years up until their split in 2002.
For how I see it - and take it for what it is, i.e. the opinion of some guy typing stuff on the internet - saying the band’s accomplishments within such a short span of time are nothing short of amazing is an understatement. You see, Heresiarh was founded in the late 90s and have always been largely tied to the Black Metal underground, a kind of music where the use of synthesizers and clicky drums have always been met with somewhat fierce resistance by the audience, see what happened with bands like Cradle of Filth, especially when they released their fourth album ‘Midian’ in 2000, or Dimmu Borgir when they released… well, anything they ever put on tape besides their first two albums. It was a time when a genre that was meant to be seen as the single most unhinged take on the sound of Extreme Metal had started to undergo a gradual transformation into a full-fledged commercial product, and that never sat too well with the majority of the genre’s early audience.
In some way, Heresiarh embodied everything that most fans of Black Metal saw as what was wrong with the genre: the clicky drums, the grandiose-sounding synthesizers, female vocals, nerdy lyrics… you name it, they probably did it. Yet they didn’t really suffer the same fate as many of their contemporaries, and that’s because the music was authentic. It still IS authentic. The band stuck with its vision and its goal, wrote their music, recorded it, released it, played concerts and call it a day when they had not much left to say. That’s part of what makes any artist authentic in my eyes, and one of the reasons why I consider Heresiarh as my personal favourite band to ever come out of the Baltics as well as the absolute Kings of Baltic Metal as a whole.
If you enjoyed reading through my ramblings about music, please subscribe and share this newsletter with someone you think might find it interesting. They’ll probably appreciate. Probably…
You can reach out to me via outer.signals [at] gmail [dot] com for all sorts of inquiries, music pitches, and feedback, as well as on the newsletter’s Instagram page.