Review: Grafjammer – De Tyfus, De Teerling
Dutch black metal is so back!
Back on the blog, that is. I assume it’s been doing fine during the time I wasn’t obsessively checking in on it. Grafjammer is a band that had thus far escaped said obsessive gaze, even though they’ve been doing their thing for over 10 years now. It’s high time that I catch up with them then, because their thing has a bunch of things I really like.
After a short affirmation that the dike will hold (this is a matter of much importance to the flatlanders, of course, so it’s good we got that out of the way), we’re off to the party with “Hachel mijn bout.” Here, we quickly learn that black metal has brought at least a plus one this time, as the track leans quite heavily on crust punk with its d-beats and gang shouts. Not only that, but about halfway through, Grafjammer put on their big sunglasses and bust out the black’n’roll, replete with some sleazy guitar noodling.
At this point, it almost seems like black metal is taking a back seat as opposed to center stage, but fret not: “Lijdensverlenger” reminds us why we’re here with the most blast beats and tremolos we’ve seen thus far. We don’t stay in that corner for too long, however, and this shall prove programmatic for De Tyfus, de Teerling. Ideas never overstay their welcome as the band flits back and forth between crust, thrash (see “Bertken,” in particular), and their core black metal sound.
Even that core is not entirely homogenous though, as throughout the album, they prove themselves capable of not just the abrasive aggression that lies at the genre’s inception—”Krengenslagers” even hearkens back to the forebears with its mid-tempo, swaggering Hellhammer riffs—but also of the more pensive side of younger proponents, such as their countrymen from the Haeresis Noviomagi collective (Turia, Fluisteraars, Iskandr, et al) that initially drew me to Dutch black metal.
The abrasiveness, however, remains the great unifier between these different elements and helps everything come together. De Tyfus, de Teerling doesn’t cleave and cut with weapons and tools, but rather rends and tears with teeth and brute force, and even the aforementioned moments of moodiness are only short breathers, with the return to ogreish aggression lurking right around the corner. After giving the predecessor a quick listen, I’m happy to find that they’ve gone a little harder in this regard here. While 2020’s De Zoute Kwel wasn’t exactly pristine either, it’s nice to hear a band highlight the rough edges rather than sand them off, especially if it serves their aesthetic as well as it does here.
A large part of that aesthetic is the vocals. Far from the usual black metal shriek, they rather evoke a chain smoker perpetually gurgling phlegm, occasionally washing it down with a swig of booze. Overall, the sonic package reminds me a lot of the similarly crusty (not to mention similarly drunk) Saccage, but Grafjammer have a cultural advantage that the Franco-Canadians can never draw on: their language.
You see, thanks to living in a country adjacent to the Netherlands, I was already familiar with making fun of Dutch way before it became a meme. While the internet’s focus on the silly vocabulary is all well and good, it does neglect the absurd sound of the language. Americans like to point out how angular and angry German sounds, but Dutch is not far off in that regard: there’s at least as many velar fricatives, making it sound like the speaker has a bad cough, and of course, this being black metal, Grafjammer’s singer exaggerates the rolled Rs (aka alveolar trills, while we’re on linguistic terminology), making everything sound that much more aggressive.
As this factor tends to get obscured when the vocal styles are more typical for the genre, I never considered it in my examinations of the country’s scene, nor had it ever occurred that sounding like that is kinda badass in a metal context. Here though, the vocals come through clear enough to make the many cracks and crunches of the Dutch language a serious enhancement to the overall hatefulness of the sound.
If you want a nicely varied, yet consistently pissed off take on black metal brandishing a full ashtray and an empty whisky bottle, look no further than this record.
4.5/5 Flaming Toilets ov Hell
De Tyfus, de Teerling is out now on Folter Records.
