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"Until the Light Takes Us” documents the crimes of the early-nineties Norwegian black metal scene. Fans and others already familiar with the music will learn nothing new. Most of the events the film depicts have already been packaged and sold many times over to novelty-starved consumers, most notably in the sensationalist tell-all book "Lords of Chaos.”

Outsiders won’t learn much about the music either, mainly because the filmmakers have focused on the warmed-over pulp details—the murders, the church burnings and the fascist political ideology of some of the music’s early practitioners—choosing to emphasize just a few personalities, mainly Fenriz (of Darkthrone) and Varg Vikerness (of Burzum).

The apolitical Fenriz is always fun to watch. Unlike a lot of the film’s other subjects, he has a sense of humor about the music. He’s self-conscious about the cult he helped start, aware of its inevitable commercialization, and resigned to the fact that the music isn’t his anymore. He tackles phone interviews with snarky irony, admitting to being a fan of electronic music and cracking jokes about the band Anthrax. He also has something to say about art, stating his preference for ugly art created by people with easy lives in the developed world to bright cheery art produced by the oppressed.

Varg Vikerness, the crown prince of black metal, is interviewed from jail where he’s serving a 21-year sentence (Norway’s maximum sentence) for stabbing to death his former friend and label mate Euronymous and burning down several medieval churches. His political views are well known in the metal world, running the gamut from antisemitic Nazism to provincial anti-Christian nationalism. The interviews actually do a good job at conveying his considerable intelligence, while still managing to reveal his crackpot beliefs about race and religion.

There is a fascinating sequence where Varg tells his version of Euronymous’s murder. His story has the desperate, self-contradictory quality of a rationalization, and you wonder while watching it how someone so proud of his conspiratorial worldview could be such a coward when it comes to admitting to his crime.

Also interviewed are members of Immortal and Satyricon (two slightly later Norwegian bands), filmmaker Harmony Korine, and a conceptual artist who has made a career of cashing in on the shocking imagery of Norwegian black metal’s first wave. These people are all interesting in their own alienated way, but they don’t really represent the entire musical movement, even at its inception. Missing are Ulver (except for in one short interview), Enslaved, Emperor, Ved Buens Ende and countless other bands that emerged at the time or a few years later.

Perhaps it’s because most of these bands ultimately forsook the raw purity of black metal for more experimental and eclectic music, some of which can be heard on the soundtrack. My own impression is that none of these musicians would talk to the filmmakers because they’ve moved on with their lives and their music.

We hear bits and pieces of actual black metal music, which in the early nineties was extremely raw and fast, recorded on no-fi equipment (in one sequence, Fenriz talks about recording on a Dictaphone), but this is mostly a ‘shocking’ true crime expose that skips the music to focus on suicide and violence, including the self-inflicted gunshot wound that killed Mayhem’s aptly named front man, Dead, and the murder of a gay man by Emperor’s Bard Faust. A comment by famous black metal drummer Hellhammer praising the murder of a "faggot” is certainly not going to endear anyone to the music here in Seattle where I saw the film.

There is no discussion about the scene at large or subsequent developments in the style—the fact that black metal has been mostly subsumed into the more general and international ‘extreme metal’ label goes mostly unmentioned. The genre’s evolution into a major sound within metal is shrugged off and dismissed by Fenriz and, by extension, the filmmakers, Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell, because it undermines the film’s obsession with aesthetic purity.

In a recent interview with the Onion’s AV Club, the directors expressed their fascination with black metal, describing its purity of expression, DIY sensibility, and apparent intelligence compared with other forms of metal. They single it out as something special. Why then the special emphasis on the exploitative aspects of the scene? Why not actually talk about the music itself, you know, the stuff actually recorded on the thing you buy (or pirate)? My impression is that they’re less fascinated by the music, and its context within metal, than they are with album covers and the dumb punk theatrics. To which I reply, so what?

As someone who actually came of age listening to this stuff, the film offers nothing new or revelatory on this stale subject. As far as I’m concerned, the topic is old hat, closed. To the film makers, I offer this one piece of advice: black metal is just music.

Once you accept that music is just music, you’ll go far in life.

This review originally appeared on my film review blog: http://www.endofmedia.com

James Slone

TRACKLIST: None.